Table of Contents
Article: Getting started with Astrato
Introduction
We are passionate about helping you seamlessly and efficiently migrate from your current tool to Astrato. With our team's extensive experience working with Qlik Sense and QlikView, we have a deep understanding of Qlik’s unique features and capabilities. From Qlik’s associative engine to its set analysis and ETL scripting language, we know how to guide you and your team on this transition.
Reasons to Switch from Qlik to Astrato
When it comes to business intelligence solutions, making the right choice can have a significant impact on an organization's ability to derive insights from its data. If you are currently using Qlik and considering a switch, Astrato offers a compelling alternative with a range of advanced features and capabilities.
Scalability and Performance
Astrato is engineered to manage large data volumes while delivering high-performance analytics. It offers scalability features that adapt to your growing data requirements, ensuring effective data analysis and insight extraction.
Cloud-Native Architecture
Operating on a cloud-native framework, Astrato provides the agility and flexibility required in today's fast-paced business landscape. This approach not only facilitates easy access and collaboration but also significantly reduces infrastructure-related costs.
Data Security and Compliance
Security is a cornerstone of Astrato's offering. The platform employs robust security protocols to safeguard sensitive data. Importantly, no data is stored on the system. Each interaction generates an SQL query for real-time visualization, allowing for a secure one-time setup at the data source level.
AI and Machine Learning Capabilities
Astrato integrates AI and machine learning directly from your Cloud Data Warehouse (CDW). This empowers businesses with actionable insights and predictive analytics, thereby enabling proactive decision-making and business growth.
Enhanced Visualization
Astrato goes beyond traditional visualization options, offering a wide array of advanced, interactive dashboards and reports. This enables users to present data in a more impactful and visually appealing manner.
Comprehensive Support and Training
Transitioning from traditional BI solutions is seamless with Astrato, thanks to comprehensive support and extensive documentation. Our dedicated support team ensures that users can quickly adapt to and maximize the capabilities of Astrato.
Affordability
Compared to traditional BI solutions like Qlik, Power BI, or Tableau, Astrato offers a cost-effective alternative. With competitive pricing models and flexible licensing options, businesses can achieve significant cost savings without compromising on advanced analytics and visualization features.
Considerations for Migrating from Qlik to Astrato
When making the transition from one BI tool to another, it's crucial to take a comprehensive look at your existing environment and identify what changes, if any, you want to make in your new setup. This process involves considering different migration approaches:
Lift and Shift Migration: The lift and shift migration approach involves replicating your current apps and dashboards in Astrato. The goal is to have the same dashboard functionality in Astrato as you currently have. While the technical implementation may differ between Qlik and Astrato, the result should be a dashboard that meets your requirements.
Reconciliation Migration: The reconciliation migration model is the most comprehensive and can be the most challenging. It is used when your current BI environment no longer meets your needs or when you want to approach things differently. In this model, you start with your current environment as a starting point, but it's important to critically evaluate all dashboards, reports, and analyses across your entire setup. This evaluation helps identify areas where improvements can be made and allows you to reimagine and redesign your BI environment to better meet your evolving needs.
Hybrid Migration: The hybrid migration approach is the most common approach. It allows for flexibility and quick time-to-value. In this scenario, some of your existing apps and dashboards may still be relevant and useful, while others may no longer fit your requirements. By assessing your environment, you can determine which components should be migrated as-is and which need to be reimagined. This approach strikes a balance between leveraging what is already in place and building new functionalities to meet evolving needs.
Reviewing your General Environment
Before embarking on any migration process, it's crucial to assess your existing setup to ensure a smooth transition and maximize its potential. Here are some essential considerations to guide you through this process:
Identify critical components: Take the time to determine which components are essential. Document these critical areas and prioritize them during the migration process.
Address problematic areas: Look for any ad-hoc fixes, obsolete code, and timing workarounds. Consider all dependencies in your Qlik environment and think through them thoroughly.
Eliminate redundancy: Identify redundant data and code and eliminate any obsolete or unnecessary areas. Use this opportunity to prioritize and make necessary decisions.
Focus on end users: Consider the types of users in your environment and their access requirements. Involve users directly, gather their input, and ensure that the new environment meets their needs and exceeds their expectations.
Prioritize use cases: Determine which use cases should be migrated and when, regardless of the migration path you choose.
Align definitions and KPIs: Ensure that all stakeholders use the same definitions for terms and key performance indicators (KPIs). Ask for their input on improving effectiveness and efficiency.
Optimize time spent: Collaborate with administrators and developers to identify areas where time is spent unnecessarily and find ways to mitigate it.
Technical differences between Qlik and Astrato
Qlik feature | Astrato equivalent | Comments |
Set analysis |
|
|
Alternate states | N/A | Compare using chart filters and custom measures as outlined above. |
NPrinting | Scheduled Reporting (coming soon) |
|
Section Access | Astrato pushes down security to the DWH, where security rules already exist. | |
Streams | Collections |
|
Reloads | N/A | Astrato is live-query |
Vizlib Custom report | Custom report |
|
Vizlib Writeback | Live writeback (insert focused) | |
Licensing |
|
Key Focus Areas
Achieving a seamless and successful migration requires focused attention on key areas. By addressing these crucial aspects, you can harness the strengths of each platform and cater to your organization's distinct requirements.
Data Sources and Extraction: Develop a comprehensive understanding of your Qlik data sources, including how they are utilized, stored, and manipulated. This will aid in the seamless integration of this data into Astrato, considering any necessary transformations.
Business Logic: Conduct a thorough evaluation of the business logic implemented within Qlik, documenting any variations present across applications. This analysis will provide valuable insights for a smooth migration process.
The Astrato virtual data layer allows for creation of dimensions and measures that can be consumed by multiple apps, this should support consolidation of apps into one virtual data layer, and simplify the maintenance of data quality.
Applications: Take stock of the various dashboards, visualizations, user-created content, and custom objects within your Qlik environment. During the migration, identify critical components and eliminate any redundant elements to optimize efficiency.
Tasks: Review the reload tasks, actions, triggers, and other processes managed in the Qlik Management Console. With Astrato's direct querying capabilities, the need for data reloads is eliminated, simplifying the process of ensuring data freshness.
Security: Consider the section access and security rules in place within Qlik, assessing their purpose and functionality. Determine the security requirements specific to Astrato and explore how your current data warehouse can support a more centralized and robust security model.
Best Practices for Migrating from Qlik to Astrato
Migrating from one data analytics platform to another can be a complex process, but with careful planning and execution, it can lead to enhanced data insights and improved decision-making capabilities. If your organization is considering migrating from Qlik to Astrato, here are some best practices to ensure a successful transition.
Define Clear Objectives: Before embarking on the migration journey, it is crucial to define clear objectives and set measurable goals that align with your organization's data and analytics strategy. By doing so, you can effectively guide the migration process and ensure that it meets the needs of your business.
Assess Data and Reports: Conduct a comprehensive assessment of your existing Qlik data and reports. Identify the data sources, models, and visualizations that need to be migrated. It is essential to evaluate data complexity and quality, considering any necessary transformations or cleansing before migrating to Astrato. Understand that Qlik scripts often rely on flat files for mapping tables and quick transformations. Understand how the data is transformed and used by different applications.
This will help you decide between Snowflake's ease-of-use and Databricks' machine learning capabilities.
Plan Data Mapping: To ensure a seamless data transition, create a mapping plan that analyzes the data models in both Qlik and Astrato. By mapping corresponding elements between the platforms, you can ensure that the data is accurately replicated. Additionally, consider any necessary data transformations or calculations to replicate existing Qlik reports in Astrato. Analyze Qlik scripts to identify data sources, storage locations, and which applications are using specific QVDs.
Astrato Query engine doesn’t requires link tables, this should allow for a simplified data model
ETL
Data Extraction
For data extraction, you've got some solid options. Streamkap is great for real-time data streaming, especially if you're dealing with high-velocity data. Fivetran is another excellent choice for automated data integration. It's pretty much plug-and-play.
Data Transformation
If you need to transform your data before loading, consider using a tool that integrates well with your chosen DWH. Both Snowflake and Databricks offer native capabilities, but you might also look into ETL platforms that can handle this.
Data Loading
Stitch (by Talend) is a fantastic tool for this. It's simple to set up and supports a wide range of data sources. It can incrementally load data into your DWH, which is a big plus for maintaining data freshness.
Set Analysis: Astrato offers custom measures, also known as calculations, advanced measures, or multi-field measures, to add flexibility to your model.
Measures include filters as part of the measures definitions and can replace set analysis expressions.
However , if the dashboard is planned as interactive, the best practice is to avoid “hidden” filters in the measures, they might point the user into the wrong insight.
Training and User Adoption: Investing in training and change management initiatives is crucial for facilitating a smooth transition for users. Provide comprehensive training on Astrato's features and functionalities to ensure that your team can effectively utilize the platform. Additionally, implement change management strategies to address any resistance and encourage user adoption.
Test and Validate: Thoroughly test and validate your migrated data and reports in Astrato before fully transitioning. Verify the accuracy, completeness, and performance of the migrated data to ensure that it meets expectations and fulfills user needs. This step is essential to identify any potential issues or discrepancies that need to be addressed.
Incremental Migration: Consider adopting a phased or incremental migration approach to minimize disruptions and manage complexity. By migrating data and reports in stages, you can gradually transition to Astrato while ensuring that critical business operations continue smoothly.
Data Governance and Security: During the migration process, it is essential to review and enhance data governance and security practices. Address data access permissions, privacy policies, and compliance requirements to ensure that data remains secure and in compliance with regulations. Establish robust data governance frameworks to maintain data integrity and security throughout the migration and beyond.
Monitor and Optimize: Continuously monitor the performance and usage of your Astrato environment post-migration. Identify areas for optimization, such as query performance, report design, and data refresh schedules.
Keep an eye on data quality and pipeline health. Tools like Fivetran offer monitoring features, so use them.
By following these best practices, your organization can navigate the migration process from Qlik to Astrato with confidence. Embrace the opportunities that this transition presents and unlock new possibilities for data-driven insights and decision-making.