The information published herein is subject to change without notice. This publication is for informational purposes only, without representation or warranty of any kind, and QlikTech shall not be liable for errors or omissions with respect to this publication. The only warranties for QlikTech products and services are those that are set forth in the express warranty statements accompanying such products and services, if any. Nothing herein should be construed as constituting any additional warranty.
The information published herein is subject to change without notice. This publication is for informational purposes only, without representation or warranty of any kind, and QlikTech shall not be liable for errors or omissions with respect to this publication. The only warranties for QlikTech products and services are those that are set forth in the express warranty statements accompanying such products and services, if any. Nothing herein should be construed as constituting any additional warranty.
The information published herein is subject to change without notice. This publication is for informational purposes only, without representation or warranty of any kind, and QlikTech shall not be liable for errors or omissions with respect to this publication. The only warranties for QlikTech products and services are those that are set forth in the express warranty statements accompanying such products and services, if any. Nothing herein should be construed as constituting any additional warranty.
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Introduction
QlikView Publisher is an optional module for QlikView Server that enables scheduling,
administration, and management tools that provide a single control point for QlikView analytics
applications and reports. Administrators can schedule, distribute, and manage security and
access for QlikView applications and reports across the enterprise.
This document tries to explain the various features of QlikView Publisher and why any
reasonable sized organisation should consider purchasing it.
The information published herein is subject to change without notice. This publication is for informational purposes only, without representation or warranty of any kind, and QlikTech shall not be liable for errors or omissions with respect to this publication. The only warranties for QlikTech products and services are those that are set forth in the express warranty statements accompanying such products and services, if any. Nothing herein should be construed as constituting any additional warranty.
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High Level Overview
QlikView Publisher distributes data stored in QlikView documents to users within and outside
the organization. By reducing data, each user can be presented with the information that
concerns them. QlikView Publisher provides the ability to maintain centralised control of all the
QlikView files and to schedule when and how they are reloaded and distributed. The QlikView
Publisher service and user interface are fully integrated into QlikView Server and the QlikView
Management Console (QMC).
QlikView Publisher can automatically reload files and distribute them to "QlikView AccessPoint
(QVS)" or by E-Mail or in an intranet. As an example, QlikView Publisher automates the
production of a file for each sales person containing only their sales targets and current
performance and has it automatically made available to the sales person in the way they have
requested (email, on an FTP site, on QlikView Server).
QlikView Publisher, as a distribution service, ensures that the right information reaches the
right user at the right time. As the use of business analysis spreads throughout the
organization, controlling the distribution of analysis becomes increasingly important. QlikView
Publisher provides for complete control of the distribution of a company’s QlikView applications,
automating the data refresh process for QlikView application data. In addition, it ensures that
applications are distributed to the users through QlikView AccessPoint.
QlikView Publisher ensures that users only have access to the documents, reports, and data
they need to get their jobs done. Based upon security criteria set by an administrator, Publisher
can slice a QlikView application into multiple QlikView documents, add row level security, and
distribute finalized QlikView documents or PDF reports to all authorized users. QlikView
Publisher integrates directly with existing enterprise security infrastructure, making
administration and distribution of business analysis and reports secure and efficient.
The information published herein is subject to change without notice. This publication is for informational purposes only, without representation or warranty of any kind, and QlikTech shall not be liable for errors or omissions with respect to this publication. The only warranties for QlikTech products and services are those that are set forth in the express warranty statements accompanying such products and services, if any. Nothing herein should be construed as constituting any additional warranty.
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Technical Concept
QlikView Publisher is a licensable add-on for QlikView Server. The basic implementation
involves adding no more than a licence key but often a customer will want to re-architect their
jobs and directory structure to gain the benefits that Publisher will give them.
QlikView Server Only (no Publisher)
At a high level this is how document management works in a QlikView Server only environment
without Publisher.
Business users access QlikView through the QlikView Web Server. This connects to the
QlikView Server which in turn accesses the QlikView Documents (.QVWs) which are contained
within “User Documents”.
Permissions are normally applied at the sub-folder levels, so for example the Sales folder might
have a “Sales” group applied to it. The net effect is that if a QlikView Document is dropped into
the Sales folder, people within the Sales group can immediately access it. In a Small Business
environment this behaviour is fine and exactly what they probably want to happen.
The QlikView Distribution Service reloads the documents on a scheduled basis. The data
being reloaded into the document could come from any supported data source. Documents
are always reloaded “in place”.
QlikView Server
QlikView Web Server (or IIS)
User
Documents
Sales
Finance
HR
QlikView Distribution Engine
....etc.
Document Reload
Users
Figure 1: QlikView Server Only Environment (Simplified)
The information published herein is subject to change without notice. This publication is for informational purposes only, without representation or warranty of any kind, and QlikTech shall not be liable for errors or omissions with respect to this publication. The only warranties for QlikTech products and services are those that are set forth in the express warranty statements accompanying such products and services, if any. Nothing herein should be construed as constituting any additional warranty.
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QlikView Server & Publisher
Although the above scenario is fine for a small organization, there are lots of reasons why it
doesn’t work so well for medium to large organizations. Some potential problems for a Server-
only environment:
Do you really want a developer to simply drop in a document and for it to become live?
Do you have any Change Control processes that your organisation must follow?
What if the developer breaks the reload process for the following day?
What if a developer drops in a document into the wrong folder and it becomes available
to the wrong users?
What if a developer drops in a document containing test or dummy data? Do you really
want this to appear to users before it’s populated with real data?
With a QlikView Publisher environment, the concept changes:
Figure 2: QlikView Server & Publisher (Simplified)
The information published herein is subject to change without notice. This publication is for informational purposes only, without representation or warranty of any kind, and QlikTech shall not be liable for errors or omissions with respect to this publication. The only warranties for QlikTech products and services are those that are set forth in the express warranty statements accompanying such products and services, if any. Nothing herein should be construed as constituting any additional warranty.
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As before users access “User Documents” via the Server components. The difference here is that documents are only made available to users when a QlikView Administrator creates a “Distribute” task. The Distribute task takes a document from a new folder structure named “Source Documents”, applies permissions and copies it into “User Documents”.
Developers do all of their development work within “Source Documents”. Once a document is ready to be made live they would ask a QlikView Administrator to create a Distribute task for publishing.
The only permissions which are applied directly would be those required to restrict which developers are allowed to develop in which folder. Permissions are not necessary on “User Documents” since it is the Publisher Distribute tasks that would maintain those.
The advantage here is now a process has to be followed before documents can be made live. This enables a level of control how documents are enabled. “User Documents” becomes no more than the production end user documents. For example “QVD Creators” or various revisions of other documents only ever exist in “Source Documents” because they never need to be distributed.
Advantages:
Documents are only live once a task has been created. This is often done following,for example an internal testing and Change Control process
Go live of documents can be scheduled at a point in the future (e.g. out of hours)
Document permissions are handled entire in Publisher Tasks thereby makingadministration properly centralised
Assuming permissions are set correctly, developers are unable to alter productiondocuments
Non-end user documents such as QVD Creators and multiple document revisions arenever exposed to end users
The information published herein is subject to change without notice. This publication is for informational purposes only, without representation or warranty of any kind, and QlikTech shall not be liable for errors or omissions with respect to this publication. The only warranties for QlikTech products and services are those that are set forth in the express warranty statements accompanying such products and services, if any. Nothing herein should be construed as constituting any additional warranty.
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Enhanced Security
QlikView Publisher’s role in the QlikView solution is to provide access to QlikView applications and data; therefore, it is important for QlikView Publisher to integrate with enterprise security solutions in addition to standard security features of QlikView Server.
QlikView Publisher is viewed as a Back End process within the QlikView solution. From a security standpoint, it’s important to understand that the Front End does not have any open ports to the Back End. It does not send any queries to data sources on the Back End, nor do any of the user documents (.QVWs) contain any connection strings to data sources located on the back end. End users can only access QlikView documents that exist on the Front End, and never in the Back End. Within the Back End, the Windows file system is always in charge of authorisation; QlikView is not responsible for access privileges.
Within a Publisher environment the responsibility for assigning Front End user permissions is all handled within Publisher tasks. This means that at the Windows file system level permissions can be left at the absolute minimum as Publisher will control access at the file level.
The information published herein is subject to change without notice. This publication is for informational purposes only, without representation or warranty of any kind, and QlikTech shall not be liable for errors or omissions with respect to this publication. The only warranties for QlikTech products and services are those that are set forth in the express warranty statements accompanying such products and services, if any. Nothing herein should be construed as constituting any additional warranty.
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Publisher Features
Now you understand what underlying advantage Publisher will add from a conceptual
viewpoint, I will now go through each additional key feature in turn.
Loop & Reduce
The Loop & Reduce functionality in Publisher takes a larger source document. It will loop
around a particular field (for example “Region”) and produce a user document (or “slice”) for
every instance it finds. It will do this including any associations, so if you chose the Region
field then it would produce 1 document per region and each would contain any other field’s data
which are associated to that region.
This carries two benefits:
When combined with the “Loop Field in Document” Distribution task each resulting
QlikView Document will only be visible to the users or groups it belongs to
Because each resulting QlikView Document is smaller the performance may be much
greater resulting in faster user response times
To explain the latter benefit a bit further (and why it’s important), let me illustrate an example.
The example here just uses sample data so please note the numbers might vary considerably
at a customer environment depending on factors such as complexity, schema and so on.
Consider a document which contains Retail data and takes up 20GB of base RAM. Let’s
suppose each user has an overhead of approximately 10% or 2GB:
2GB (User5 - North)
2GB (User4 - North)
2GB (User3 - South)
2GB (User2 - East)
2GB (User1 - West)
20GB
(base RAM) Total RAM
Usage:
~30GB
Figure 3: Example RAM Usage for a Single QlikView Document
The information published herein is subject to change without notice. This publication is for informational purposes only, without representation or warranty of any kind, and QlikTech shall not be liable for errors or omissions with respect to this publication. The only warranties for QlikTech products and services are those that are set forth in the express warranty statements accompanying such products and services, if any. Nothing herein should be construed as constituting any additional warranty.
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There are currently four users currently logged in, each only needs to see their own region.
Despite this, each user’s session will still have to calculate across the whole data set, even if
they are only interested in part of it.
Now we use Loop & Reduce to “slice” up the document into four smaller ones:
Already you can see that the total RAM has been reduced. Not only that but each user now
only has a quarter of RAM used for each session. The performance for the users may be much
faster because the CPUs only have a much smaller dataset to work on. Now imagine this with
100 users and think how much better this situation becomes.
Clearly such an approach is not always possible. If for example you have a user that needs to
see both North and South, they would have to open two documents. One point worth making
however is that such an approach does not negate the use of the large document as well. You
could still host both.
For more details of how this might work with multiple documents (for example an aggregate
dashboard, a full detailed transactional dashboard followed by lots of slices) please see the
“Scalability” documents in the Enterprise Framework.
0.5GB
(User5)
West)0.5GB
(User4)
West)
5GB
(base
RAM)
North Total RAM
Usage:
~22.5GB
0.5GB
(User3)
West)
5GB
(base
RAM)
South
0.5GB
(User2)
West)
5GB
(base
RAM)
East
0.5GB
(User1)
West)
5GB
(base
RAM)
West
Figure 4: Document Which Has Been Sliced Using Loop & Reduce
The information published herein is subject to change without notice. This publication is for informational purposes only, without representation or warranty of any kind, and QlikTech shall not be liable for errors or omissions with respect to this publication. The only warranties for QlikTech products and services are those that are set forth in the express warranty statements accompanying such products and services, if any. Nothing herein should be construed as constituting any additional warranty.
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Email Distribution of QlikView Documents
With Publisher, it is possible to create Publisher tasks that not only distribute to QlikView
Servers but also email QlikView Documents to end users using an enterprise’s “SMTP Server”.
For example, this may be useful if an organization has remote managers who need offline
copies of a document. This is assuming a document is small enough to email but also note
that this feature can be combined with Loop & Reduce.
Email Distribution of Static PDF Reports (requires additional licence)
QlikView clients have the ability to generate static PDF reports. Think of old style legacy
reporting without the power that QlikView’s data discovery platform normally provides.
Even though this loses the power of QlikView there are occasionally good Use Cases for it.
For example you may have a senior manager who insists on receiving a traditional report at
9am every morning and refuses to change their behaviour. Another example would be a
warehouse who wants a static “pick list” of items they want to print out and pick items off.
There is a licensable add-on for QlikView Publisher that can be purchased which enables mass
e-mail of these static PDF reports. Reports can be scheduled to run (based off a QlikView
Document) and mass emailed to potentially thousands of users.
Splitting QlikView Server and Publisher onto Different Hosts
Without QlikView Publisher, the QlikView Server (QVS) and QlikView Distribution Service
(QDS) have to exist on the same physical host.
If reloads happen outside of normal working hours then this setup is not an issue. If however
reloads take place during the day at the same time as end users accessing the system then
serious contention between the two may occur. A QlikView document reload may use a
reasonable amount of RAM and CPU during a reload process.
With a Publisher licence, it is possible to place the QDS onto a different physical server as the
QVS. This means that reload processes can take place and place no end impact on a user.
For organisations who have a QlikView Cluster it rarely makes sense to host the QDS on a
single Server node, so for these organisations I’d expect Publisher to be almost compulsory.
Resiliency & Increased Scale for Reloads (requires additional licence)
For organisations where the reload process becomes critical, with Publisher it is possible to
install more than one QlikView Distribution Service (QDS) on several physical servers. The
QDS instances can then be configured to be clustered so that all are active at the same time.
This means that if one server fails the other can handle the load. Also because we now have
several servers all active more reload processes can be run concurrently.
Note that this feature requires an additional “Execution Engine” licence for each node you wish
to add.
See the White Paper titled “Technical White Paper – Clustering QDS” for more detail on this
The information published herein is subject to change without notice. This publication is for informational purposes only, without representation or warranty of any kind, and QlikTech shall not be liable for errors or omissions with respect to this publication. The only warranties for QlikTech products and services are those that are set forth in the express warranty statements accompanying such products and services, if any. Nothing herein should be construed as constituting any additional warranty.
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Distributing to Multiple QlikView Servers
Imagine an environment where there are two QlikView Servers, each in a different location.
With Publisher it is possible to distribute documents from one location to many.
In the following example the data centre is in Birmingham which is where the organisation’s
database server is sited. Their end users are hosted in both London and New York so they
have placed servers at the two locations because the connection to Birmingham is too slow to
be used for client traffic.
In the example here, all the development, backup of QlikView documents etc. can be done in
Birmingham. The QlikView Servers at London and New York become no more than end points
where users connect.
Without Publisher the development would have to be done at one site and manually copied to
the other. The reload process may have to happen twice from the source system causing
The information published herein is subject to change without notice. This publication is for informational purposes only, without representation or warranty of any kind, and QlikTech shall not be liable for errors or omissions with respect to this publication. The only warranties for QlikTech products and services are those that are set forth in the express warranty statements accompanying such products and services, if any. Nothing herein should be construed as constituting any additional warranty.
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Delegated Administration
Publisher has a feature named “Document Administrators”. Normally for a user to do any
administration using the QlikView Management Console (QMC) they need to be a member of
the “QlikView Administrators” group. This gives them the facility to fully administer a QlikView
Server environment.
What if for example you want the Finance department to run their own reloads and create their
own tasks? This is where Document Administrators come in.
Figure 6: Document Administrators in the QMC
You could for example enable some key Finance users as Document Administrators for the
“Finance” mounted folder. These users could then access the QMC and would be able to
create and run tasks against the Finance folder. They would not see other departments and
would also not see the “System” tab so will be unable to tinker with any server configuration
settings.
Document Administrators can be defined independently for both Source and Destination
mounted folders.
Remote Management Services
More than likely in an enterprise environment all applications have to go through a user
acceptance testing phase prior to going into Production. As part of this it is also necessary to
test the Reload and Distribution processes too. This means that the tasks will be built in a Test
Publisher before being rebuilt in a Production Publisher.
Remote Management Services provides an easier way of transitioning Publisher tasks from
one QlikView Management Console to another. Tasks can be “copied and pasted” from for
The information published herein is subject to change without notice. This publication is for informational purposes only, without representation or warranty of any kind, and QlikTech shall not be liable for errors or omissions with respect to this publication. The only warranties for QlikTech products and services are those that are set forth in the express warranty statements accompanying such products and services, if any. Nothing herein should be construed as constituting any additional warranty.
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Advanced Scheduling
One of the key features of Publisher is to greatly enhance the scheduling ability of QlikView
tasks. Some examples:
Last day of month trigger – With Publisher an administrator can create a task which runs
on the last day of the month. Without Publisher this is not possible, the best that can
be done is to have tasks run on the 28th of each month.
“On Multiple Events” trigger – A trigger than can start a task if 2 or more other tasks have
completed. Imagine for example you have two QVD Creators creating two pools of
QVDs and you want to use both in your dashboard
Multiple triggers per task – Sometimes you might want to have for example two different
schedules on the same task (e.g. run 4 times on a Saturday morning plus at 3am every
weekday night). Alternatively you may want to have a schedule but also want to
enable external event to trigger the same task
Multiple tasks per document – You may want to create two different tasks on the same
document. For example an email plus a distribute task.
Task dependencies – You may want to have a task that is triggered by another but also
have a “check” to ensure another dependant task has succeeded before running
Supporting Tasks – These are non-QlikView tasks. For example, a task to start a
Command Line or run a SQL Statement following a QlikView reload. This could for
instance inform a third party utility that Publisher is finished.
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Frequently Asked Questions
Q.) How many QlikView Publisher licences should I purchase?
A.) As many as you have controlled administrative environments. So for instance you may have for testing Development and UAT servers and in Production a two node cluster. In this example you would probably need two Publisher licences, one for Development/UAT and the other for the Production Cluster.
If in this example the teams responsible for Development and UAT were different, each with their own Change Control processes then that would require the need for a third Publisher.
Each Publisher means its own set of tasks so this should be mapped to your business processes for bringing documents from test to production.
The information published herein is subject to change without notice. This publication is for informational purposes only, without representation or warranty of any kind, and QlikTech shall not be liable for errors or omissions with respect to this publication. The only warranties for QlikTech products and services are those that are set forth in the express warranty statements accompanying such products and services, if any. Nothing herein should be construed as constituting any additional warranty.
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Glossary
IIS – Microsoft’s “Internet Information Services”. Microsoft’s web server which can be used
instead of the “QlikView Web Server (QVWS)”.
Loop & Reduce – taking one QlikView document and “slicing” it up into lots of smaller QlikView
documents based on a field
QlikView Directory Services Connector (DSC) – the QlikView Server service which talks to a
directory (e.g. Active Directory) to do User to Group resolution for authorisation
QlikView Distribution Service (QDS) – the QlikView Server/Publisher service which reloads and
distributes documents
QlikView Management Service (QMS) – the QlikView Server service which is used for
management and provides the QlikView Management Console for administration
QlikView Server service (QVS) – the QlikView Server service which shares documents
QlikView Web Server (QVWS) – the QlikView Server service which provides the AccessPoint
portal and exposes the QVS to end users
QVD File – a custom QlikView file format for holding data. This can be imported into QlikView
at high speed
QVD Creator (A.K.A. QVD Loader) – a QlikView Document (.QVW) who’s sole purpose is to
create QVD files. It is not used as an end user dashboard whatsoever
Section Access – the ability to restrict what someone can see within a QlikView document
based on what user they are logged in with
SMTP Server – An acronym for “Simple Mail Transport Protocol”. Most organisations will have
an SMTP server which can be used to email people within the organisation. QlikView can
connect to this
Source Documents – the backend folder structure for Publisher. It is used as an area for
development
Trigger – the event which causes a QlikView Server or Publisher task to begin
User Documents – the backend folder structure for QlikView Server. It is the folder structure
which is visible to end users (based on their security credentials)
