PL/SQL Tutorial - Lesson 2: Variables and Constants

In this lesson we will review variables and how to use then in a PL/SQL block.

PL/SQL Tutorial - Lesson 1: What is PL/SQL?

Introduction

This tutorial is a very basic introduction to PL/SQL, the purpose is to provide you all the knowledge that you could need to start developing scripts in PL/SQL. If you want to  go more in depth and get more information about how PL/SQL works, sentence structure of functions you can go to the resources section.

Qlik Summer School Webinar Series - Visual Analitics Design Best Practices

The Visual Analytics Design Best Practices webinar was presented by Patrick Lundblad, Senior Product Manager, and Adam Booth, Product Designer. This session was really interesting not only because it was full of tips about data visualization design, but also because the very interesting facts about data visualization history.

Qlik Summer School Webinar Series - Qlik Project Management Methodology

The second webinar of the "Buoyant Best Practices" week was given by Helen Davey, Qlik Global Project Manager. In this session, she explained the Qlik Project Management (QPM) methodology followed by Qlik, the key areas they focus on, and what are the phases that make up a project.

Qlik Summer School Webinar Series - Customer Success Program

The Qlik Summer School Webinar Series has started. During three weeks Qlik Tech is offering a series of webinars full of tips and tricks that can be useful to leverage your organization's data analytics. Each week is focused on a specific area, week one was dedicated to new products, week two is focused on best practices, and during week three we will know more about current products. So, as a data fan, I decided to attend to all webinars held on week two and three. We are in week two now, and I'm sharing my takeaways from each session, hoping that you find this information helpful.

QlikView: Quick tip #3 - Show links in straight tables

Sometimes you will be required to add links to redirect users to the original source of data. This usually happens when you are analyzing help desk information, and you need to check the original ticket. Instead of moving to your help desk system and look for the ticket, you can add a link in QlikView that redirects you to the one that you need to verify. In this quick tip, we will show you how to add links in a straight table. Current example has been applied to redirect users to posts in this blog, but the same approach can be used in other scenarios.

QlikView: Quick tip #2 - Fixed colors in charts

Let say that you are building a dashboard to analize data from a helpdesk system, and you have been requested to add a chart that shows the total of open cases by category (low, medium, high, and emergency). You create the chart, and everything looks fine except for the fact that when you start filtering the data you notice that the colors assigned to each category are not always the same (check the image below, if data is filtered to show only January tickets high is in red color, but if February is selected high is displayed in blue). In this quick tip we explain how to avoid this situation, and keep the color assigned to each posible value in a dimension fixed.

QlikView: Quick tip #1 - Show/hide elements using text objects

Sometimes, we have a lot of objects related that we want to keep in the same sheet. Containers can be an option to avoid crowded visualizations. They are easy to use, you can group and hide and display objects, but when it comes to style, you don't have too many options to play with. Instead, we can use text objects along with variables to display or not objects. In this quick tutorial, I explain how to do it.

QlikView: Custom Calendar Generator

The calendar date dimensions is maybe the most common dimension in a data warehouse.  Sometimes calendars are pretty simple and only contain values such as Year, Month, or Date and some additional format variations like Month-Year, or Quarter-Year.  But, other times you could need additional information  such as fiscal year or holidays.  The Custom Calendar Generator is an application that can be used to create QVDs with calendar information. It has been designed to add holidays, and fiscal period.

QlikView: Creating a trend chart for stock data

Some time ago, I was looking for some ways to display stock data, and then I came across with the chart below from Google finance. What I like about this chart is the possibility of filter the range of data that you want to analyze(1) keeping and overview of the entire history (2). So I decided to focus in these two features and try to elaborate something similar in QlikView.

The Importance of the Surrogate Key in a well design data model

A couple of years ago, when I started working in the data warehouse world, the company I was working  for hired a consultant firm to help us to start building our data warehouse. And, as part of the contract, the consultants would also deliver a set of dashboards and reports. When the first set of reports came to us, we decided to take a look on the code (after all the product being used by the company was completely new for us, and we thought it was a good way to learn more from the experts). After having checked the scripts that generate and maintained the employee dimension, we noticed that the dimension key was built concatenating the date when the record was created and the employee id, which indeed is not a good practice (shame on you experts).