QlikTech Desktop App To Offer Billion-Record Analysis Power

QlikTech rolled out a new version of its QlikView line of analytics tools that the company says maintains QlikView's ease of use but effectively doubles its records-processing power to the one billion mark.

QlikTech announced the upgrade, called QlikView Version 7.2, on Monday. The Lund, Sweden-based company touts QlikView as simplifying the same analytics functionality as software from the company's larger rivals.

QlikTech differs from most analytics software makers in that its flagship product stores data in a memory-based data manager. Memory access is faster than access to relational or multi-dimensional databases stored on a hard disk. Therefore, query response time is faster.

QlikView 7.2 is designed to take advantage of Intel's newest standard 64-bit multi-processor platforms. QlikView splits tasks across available processors and processor cores via parallel threads. QlikTech CEO Mans Hultman estimated that the last version of QlikView, release 7.0, had a "practical processing limit" of half a billion records. Any larger number would slow the older application's response times, he said.

"It's the scale that has changed, and to me that's the most significant change," said Hultman.

The new release also supports more client platforms than its predecessor. It's now compatible with the Mozilla Web Browser engine, making it possible to use the tool through the Firefox and Netscape 8 browsers. QlikView supports the Linux and Mac OS X platforms. QlikView Java clients add support for Sun Java version 1.3 or later.