Fast QVD viewer

Professional tool for QlikView developers

QViewer is a fast (1mln rows loads in 1-2s) and lightweight (<200KB) standalone file viewer for analyzing QlikView's QVD files, created by QlikView developer for QlikView developers.

QViewer is a professional productivity tool and it saves you time you spend for developing and debugging QlikView applications, especially when you're dealing with applications designed by someone else. With only a couple of clicks you can look inside any QVD, find out what created it and when, check fields for duplicates, detect nulls, count basic aggregates and do many more without creating a throwaway QlikView application every time, as you would otherwise do.

And even more than that — using a simple trick you can inspect any resident table at any point of the loading script of a QlikView application with only a single line of code.

Features

  • View and search row-level data of a QVD file (nulls are searchable too)
  • Instant one-click listboxes — click column header to get searchable list of unique field values with counts
  • Full table and column metadata obtained from XML header of a QVD file, including lineage information with SQL statements
  • Simple query tool for calculating aggregates (num/null/text counts, sum, avg) for a field against a chosen dimension
  • Partial (limited) load for viewing large files
  • Portable — just copy qviewer.exe to your USB-drive (.NET 4 or higher required on guest OS)

Screenshot of QViewer (clickable)

QViewer screenshot

What is a QVD file

QVD is a special format of files that are generated by QlikView applications for storing table data. Since structure of a QVD file reflects native in-memory representation of data in QlikView, QlikView applications can read and write them very quickly (up to several millions of records per second), which makes QVD files the fastest data source possible for QlikView. Therefore, using QVD files is a preferred way for accumulating historical data by QlikView applications and exchanging information between them.

qvd structure

One QVD file stores information about one table. From technical standpoint, a QVD file consists of XML header and binary block with row-level data. The XML header contains valuable metadata about the table, like name of the QlikView application which created the file or SQL statements which were executed prior to storing the file, while the binary block keeps compressed row-level table data. All information from XML header and binary block can easily be viewed with the help of QViewer — that's what it was made for.