Natural Synergies, Inc. is happy to announce that the next session of the Masters Summit for QlikView is going to take place in Chicago, our home city, on April 1-3!

Masters Summit for QlikView started in 2013 as an advanced technical venue for experienced QlikView developers. Our first event took place in Las Vegas in March 2013, and the feedback was overwhelmingly positive. Even the most skeptical geeks in the audience left the conference with many tangible take-aways that were applicable to their QlikView projects.

Following Las Vegas, we held 2 more events in October 2013 – in London and Barcelona – where we shared knowledge with QlikView professionals from Europe. In London, we had a number of well known QlikView experts join us as special guests. Stephen Redmond, Steve Dark and Henric Cronstrom participated in all the discussions, adding interesting angles to the discussion topics. By the way, this is where Henric discovered for himself that COUNT(DISTINCT) is still considered a bad practice everywhere outside of the R&D department (which hasn’t been the case since QlikView 9.00.)

This year, the Masters Summit event is coming to Chicago. Most of the agenda will contain the same deep technical content that was so successful in Las Vegas, London and Barcelona. In addition, we are expecting a strong cast of special guests joining us for the evening sessions and for the experts panel.

A few words about the agenda. The main curriculum consists of four main topics taught by the four presenters.

Rob Wunderlich is teaching a very technical session about Advanced Scripting. You will learn everything there is to know about variables, best practices for quality scripting, testing, and debugging your scripts. You will also get introduced to a valuable library of QlikView Components that can significantly improve your scripting productivity.

Then, Barry Harmsen (a well known blogger and a book author) will talk about Data Modeling. QlikView developers know that data modeling in QlikView is not always trivial and that is where the difference between a professional and a rookie will stand out the most. Barry covers the most commonly used data models and provides tangible recommendations for building each of them.

Bill Lay‘s session on Advanced Visualizations will describe many unusual and uncommon ways of building effective visualizations in QlikView. Bill goes well beyond the stock bar charts and scatter charts. You’ll learn enough aesthetic techniques to make your applications both visually appealing and functionally effective.

Then, your humble servant Oleg Troyansky, whom you may know from this blog and from the QlikCommunity forums, is teaching Set Analysis and Advanced Aggregation. This is a very intense, brain-crushing session that dives deep into the darkest corners of QlikView expressions. We will talk about Set Analysis, with simple search and advanced search, and with both explicit and implicit criteria. We will examine the differences between using TOTAL qualifiers and using the Advanced Aggregation function AGGR. And how DISTINCT aggregation is different from NODISTINCT. And how Set Analysis and Advanced Aggregation work together. And much, much more. You will leave the session feeling slightly light-headed, but you will keep the exercise app with 15 tangible recipes for building advanced analytic solutions with Set Analysis and Advanced Aggregation.

In addition to the four main courses, we will have our evening sessions  that usually include one of the guest presentations and an expert panel. Our “Stump the Geek” panel was very successful in Barcelona, where we encouraged the participants to bring their toughest QlikView questions and stump the panel of experts. We answered several tough questions and we built several neat solutions on the fly (for an example, see my blog article here.)

On the third day of the conference, we are offering four shorter sessions on various advanced aspects of QlikView – Performance Tuning, Competency Center Best Practices, Server and Publisher Best Practices and Tips and Tricks. Those topics were selected based on the most popular demand from our prior participants, and they offer a nice opportunity to widen your horizons and learn more about various aspects of QlikView implementation. Those sessions are also enriched by the live conversation that sparks between the participants and the experts in the room, including our special guests.

To summarize, the three days of the event are packed with technical knowledge, tangible recommendations, and applicable recipes for success with QlikView development. In addition, the event provides unique networking opportunities, bringing together QlikView experts, partners, and customers to share their knowledge and experience.

If you are an experienced QlikView developer and you are looking for an opportunity to take your QlikView knowledge to the next level, check out our agenda and decide if Masters Summit for QlikView is right for you. Hope to see you in Chicago on April 1-3 !