Mats Severin brings the lowdown on what’s new in the Qlik Cloud June 2022 release…
A new refresh option in the catalog indicates when dataset metadata has changed from the last known state. This allows users to choose when to refresh the derived metadata, and know how up-to-date the metadata are. When a change of a dataset is detected, the refresh icon is green. If no changes are detected and metadata is up-to-date, the refresh icon will appear grey.
Users can now order their search in the Catalog to show the most Recently used content first. This new sort option allows you to access the content you use most frequently.
Catalog can now register data that is stored in relational databases such as Oracle, SQL Server and Snowflake. Data admins can add, manage, select, and distribute these additional content types, increasing the reusability, visibility and governance of the data. It also simplifies data usage as data consumers no longer need to directly connect with and browse through these data sources. Instead, they can browse for this type of data within the catalog in Qlik Cloud.
You can now share apps with users who are not members of a shared or managed space. Sharing an app to a non-member gives the selected user access to only that resource in the space. This improvement will reduce administration, simplify management of the space and facilitate collaboration with more users and groups. To share an app, click on an app’s More Actions menu, select Share and then add the user.
Performance evaluation improvements now present public sheet performance measurements as part of the evaluation. App developers can now see which sheets are holding back the initial load time of an app as well as subsequent loads when sheet content should typically be cached. There is also an option to drill down to the top 5 slowest objects per sheet.
Furthermore, enhancements have been made when measuring un-cached response times for objects in isolation. Improved isolation reduces inter-object caching for better fairness when comparing and ranking objects based on response times.
Users can now see other notes related to a specific chart simply by right-clicking on the chart and select the option Notes > Find notes related to this chart. If another note contains a snapshot of the chart, it will show in a list of related notes. This will improve collaboration as users can quickly identify and access other notes related to the same charts.
Application Automation has added two new connectors and updated an existing connector, as well as adding four new templates.
Three new Alerting templates and one new Amazon S3 template.
New improvements in the Application Automation canvas provide improved navigation by better zoom control and the ability to pan the automation instead of horizontal or vertical scrolling. Furthermore, enhancements to the design of blocks, the block library, and the block configuration pane has been made. Also, a new toolbar at the top of the canvas provides quick access to change automation settings, reposition and zoom, undo and redo, save, run, and view the output.
Improvements to subscriptions, reports, and PDF downloads allow you to further customise, define, and enhance report outputs. Improvements include:
• Support for custom themes in PDFs.
• Improved look and feel with margin minimums and higher resolution PDFs.
• Fixed-size delivery for PDF report outputs.
The Office 365 SharePoint Metadata connector has been updated to support access to Microsoft SharePoint lists and views. The following new tables can now be loaded in the Data manager:
• View
• ItemsFromList
The Amazon S3 connector now has an additional option to assign an SSE header value during authentication. This can be used with the STORE command only.
The Hybrid Data Delivery Service now lets you land SaaS application data from cloud data sources directly to Google Cloud BigQuery.
Customers with existing JWT (JSON Web Token) configurations now have until July 19, 2022, to update their JWT token creation code with two new attributes. These attributes were introduced to enhance the security and use of JWTs sent to Qlik Cloud tenants with configured JWT identity provider configurations. After July 18, 2022, those using JWT login methods without these additional attributes will be denied access.
Qlik Sense Enterprise SaaS – Government (US) users have additional Microsoft data sources to access government services. US Government data sources are named according to the environment they connect to and include the following connectors:
Qlik is building on the strong release month of May with an even longer list of updates in June. This month has primarily seen a focus on improvements to the Data Catalog and connectivity across multiple areas of the platform. Not to forget Application Automation which keeps rolling out new connectors and user templates.
To start with the Data Catalog, which is the main user interface for structuring all types of content in Qlik Cloud, a few new features have been introduced including the new refresh metadata option for datasets and a new sort option when filtering content.
Another new feature in the Data Catalog, connection-based datasets, will make it possible to display available datasets directly from relational data sources, including SQL server, Oracle and Snowflake, and make these browsable from the Catalog rather than needing to go into the data connection itself to preview and look for data. Despite looking similarly to other dataset items in the Catalog, connection-based datasets are connections to the data source, and could be seen as a reference to the data rather than a loaded and stored dataset.
Connectivity improvements have been made across different areas of the platform. From improvements to the SharePoint Metadata connector in Data Manager and more authentication options in the Amazon S3 connector, to the ability to land external SaaS data into Google Cloud BigQuery using the Hybrid Data Delivery service. Speaking of connectivity, Application Automation now has new connectors to Microsoft Azure Blob Storage and Qlik’s very own Qlik Enterprise Manager.
Lastly, worth highlighting is the new option to grant access to a specific app for a non-member of a space, rather than adding them as a member with access to all apps in the entire space. This will greatly simplify management of space and app access.
Topic: Data analytics