Reviewing data loading concepts

There are a few things that we need to remind ourselves of before we can fully grasp the concepts covered in this chapter.

Getting data from anywhere

QlikView is data-agnostic. It doesn't care where the data comes from, all QlikView cares about is whether the data is numeric or alphanumeric, and if it is numeric, does it have an alphanumeric representation that needs to be stored. Hence, for practical discussion purposes, there are only two datatypes in QlikView—numeric and dual.

Note

QlikView does actually recognize both integer and float values and stores them accordingly, with floats taking up more storage bytes. If the numeric values have a format, then they are stored as duals—with the number and the formatted string stored together. The Floor function will not only remove decimals from a number, leaving just an integer, but it will also remove any formatting so it will reduce the amount of space needed to store the values.

This is sometimes difficult for...