Qlik Best Practice – Data Connections

In the latest instalment of our Qlik Best Practices series, I’m going to provide some important information around data connections.

Data connections are created in the Hub and administered in the QMC. By default, Qlik assumes a data connection is personal and therefore suffixes it with the user’s credentials. It is recommended you follow these four standards:

– All non-personal data connections should be owned by the Qlik service account, or similar dedicated account, and not an actual user. This is to prevent important resources, such as data connections, being associated to a person, who in time may leave the business and have their account revoked.

This means when logged into an account other than the Qlik service account, you will need to navigate to the QMC and change the ownership of any shared connections you create.

– All non-personal connections should have the suffix of the user credentials removed, this is achieved by modifying the data connection name in the QMC. This is to ensure data connection names are intuitively and consistently labelled.

– Data connections that are expected to be used by business users should avoid, where possible, containing subfolders and therefore be a single-click to the source file – don’t leave it up to the end-user to navigate through the folder structure. This will help decrease user frustration and abandonment. The golden rule is a resource should never be more than three clicks away from a user.

– If you intend to allow business users build their own applications, it is best practice that a data connection should be created per business purpose/departmental folder. This also means you can limit permissions to specific folders (data connections) via security rules.

In summary, data connections should not be neglected and thought into their use, naming and setup could make a lot of difference to the success of a self-service analytics platform such as Qlik Sense.

If you want to learn more about best practice information for Qlik Sense, then be sure to take a look at our free Qlik Enablement Platform OmetisToolkit.com. Here you can find tools, tips and tricks as well as comprehensive best practice information to help you utilise your Qlik software efficiently.

As always, you can stay abreast of the latest Qlik news and information by following the ometis social channels via Twitter and LinkedIn. You will also find best practice walk-throughs and latest feature reviews on the official ometis YouTube channel and our blog.

By Christopher Lofthouse

Topic: Data analytics