I think that's not terribly fair. I agree with you in part that it's got it's problems, as I had hours worth of data lost due to its stupid way of saving a single file completely only after a reload, and it's auto-backup barfed in some strange and unexplained way, but it's reasonably snappy at aggregating and allowing for drill downs.
I personally dislike the fact it relies on natural joins so you are forced to use defined columns with the same names and use Qlik syntax to disable table linking, but others love that feature.
As an ETL tool actually it's pretty good. But if they had decided to go with straight SQL and extended it to external sources then it wouldn't have stupid syntactical EXISTS and NOT EXISTS clauses, but that's all I can really fault it on.
It's a good tool for what it does, and it turns out that what it can do is a lot! The biggest issue I found was that whilst I picked up the syntax basics in a day and it's more intricate features in a week or two, most of the Qlik developers in Australia are morons who charge a lot and deliver very little. I was very lucky to have an amazing colleague who does know his stuff, but the consultants who we were eventually forced to get in were awful. Then again, the CEO of that company was just walked out the door for gross incompetence so it was probably a combo of stupid management and a limited talent pool for Qlik devs.
I personally dislike the fact it relies on natural joins so you are forced to use defined columns with the same names and use Qlik syntax to disable table linking, but others love that feature.
As an ETL tool actually it's pretty good. But if they had decided to go with straight SQL and extended it to external sources then it wouldn't have stupid syntactical EXISTS and NOT EXISTS clauses, but that's all I can really fault it on.
It's a good tool for what it does, and it turns out that what it can do is a lot! The biggest issue I found was that whilst I picked up the syntax basics in a day and it's more intricate features in a week or two, most of the Qlik developers in Australia are morons who charge a lot and deliver very little. I was very lucky to have an amazing colleague who does know his stuff, but the consultants who we were eventually forced to get in were awful. Then again, the CEO of that company was just walked out the door for gross incompetence so it was probably a combo of stupid management and a limited talent pool for Qlik devs.