For those of certain age who enjoyed the original Star Trek TV series, you may recall a device called the Universal Translator. This hand-held gadget would instantly translate and speak your spoken words in another language. It was a handy thing to have when trying to convince an alien that you were a friend, not a foe. The cool thing is that some simple universal translators are actually starting to appear in the market, although I don’t believe any of them can yet speak Klingon or Romulan.
I was reminded of this device when thinking about the latest release of Qlik Catalog, as it’s turning into a bit of a universal publisher. Qlik Catalog September 2020, once again, expands the number of BI tools and data sources that you can directly publish to (or send) any dataset that’s defined in Qlik Catalog. This includes:
- Qlik Sense Enterprise Client-managed – Create a new app with this data
- Qlik Sense Enterprise Client-managed – Add this data to an existing app
- Qlik Sense Enterprise SaaS – Add this data to the cloud Hub
- A file in Qlik’s QVD format
- PowerBI Premium
- PowerBI Pro
- Tableau Desktop
- Amazon Redshift
- A file in Microsoft’s Azure Data Lake Store
- A file in an FTP server
- A file in an FTP server (using secure SSH tunnel)
- A file in Amazon’s S3 Storage
- An object within Azure's object storage option (Windows Azure Storage Blob or WASB) in containers with data in the form of blobs
- An object using SSL certificates for improved security within Azure’s object storage option (Windows Azure Storage Blob or WASB) in containers with data in the form of blobs
- Entities that are registered to Hive tables on top of HDFS
- A file in the Hadoop file system (HDFS)
- Any RDBMS via Sqoop transfer
And even more targets are planned for future releases.
Qlik is doing this because we recognize that our Data Integration tools need to work with many applications and tools, not just Qlik Analytics. Of course, we think that Qlik is the best choice for data analytics but recognize that an organization may use more than one BI tool. By having such a wide selection of targets, Qlik Catalog can be the one tool used by everyone to provide data to many different applications.
Qlik Catalog can also be used to “free” datasets that, until now, could only be used by Qlik. QVD files are used by many Qlik customers because of their high performance and great versatility but could only be understood by QlikView and Qlik Sense. It can also be a challenge for companies to organize and share what could be thousands of QVD files. Not only does Qlik Catalog provide the ability to catalog QVD files and make them available to users together with other data sources, it also enables bi-directional translation of QVD files. Like any other data source being managed by Qlik Catalog, you can both share data in QVD files with other BI tools or convert any data into a QVD file. For example, you could publish data from a QVD file into Tableau or you could publish data from a mainframe into a QVD file.
As Mike Capone said in his QlikWorld keynote this year – “We are your partner to help you bridge the gap between data and BI, giving you the ability to do more than you could ever do before.” Qlik Catalog is one of Qlik’s Data Integration tools that can help bridge that gap. Giving users the ability to publish any data within the Catalog to many different BI tools and repositories is one way that Qlik can give you the ability to do more than you could ever do before.
Learn more about Qlik Catalog.
