The Qlikview Governance Dashboard (“QGD”) is now available for download in QlikMarket. It’s marked as “beta” but it looks to be pretty close to complete.

QGD is a Qlikview app that scans files from your Qlikview deployment — QVW, QVD, log files — and builds a dashboard of metrics that can be utilized to understand and manage your deployment. There is a  FAQ available here.

QGD replaces the MetaScanner sample that was available on the Community. QGD is a QT supported product, whereas MetaScanner was provided as a sample app.

QGD uses a Connector, an Expressor dataflow, and a hidden script to do the scanning. The dataflow cannot be modified by the customer. Not a problem as this is now supported by QT. The scanner tolerates older (pre V10) qvws without error.

The data model produced by QGD is pretty comprehensive, and in my limited review, accurate and useful. You can use the dashboard objects as delivered or binary load the model to create your own analysis.

The scanner reports on some attributes that were previously difficult to scan, such as the document “Generate Logfile” property. The dashboard presents some interesting displays. I like the idea of counting expression variations against a label. For example, we can see that something labeled “Proceeds” is associated with twelve different definitions  Those variations may indicate a business difference or perhaps just different set modifiers — you have to look to see — but it can point to something worth reviewing.

For complete lineage results, you must run the scanner on the same machine where the reloads took place, using the same path mapping.

There are some improvements I’d like to see. The current notion of a database “source” is whatever appears after the FROM keyword in the SELECT. That works for a simple select but yields less useful and sometimes incorrect results for more complex SQL. In my QVD Dictionary app, I parse the DB table  names out of the SQL statements. I’m sure a connector could do this much easier by leveraging a SQL parser.

I would also like to see the one QVW Field to many QVW Table relationship. Currently, a Field is reported as being in only one table.  The complete association would allow us to analyze table associations, synthetic keys and even draw table models of a QVW.

All in all, a great move forward. I’m happy this is now available and will be testing it on different customer deployments.