That's interesting, because I don't know what one should do to make QlikView slower than Excel. I used to do QlikView development full time for many years and I

That's interesting, because I don't know what one should do to make QlikView slower than Excel. I used to do QlikView development full time for many years and I know pretty well what it's capable of, but I still can't imagine what that could be. QlikView is one of the fastest in-memory engines ever created. It's being perfected since 90s and now it's extremely optimized using techniques like JIT compilation, extensive parallelization with near linear scalability, and multiple layers of caching. Sub-second response times on datasets with tens of millions of rows on a rather average server are typical. It never came to my mind to compare it against Excel (since it's a totally different league), but I guess Qlik would be 3-4 orders of magnitude faster than Excel (PowerPivot is a different story). When you refer to QlikView's query language I guess you mean the Qlik load script which is used for initial loading data in memory. While it's indeed slow (it's single-threaded), it's never ever used for querying. It's not even technically feasible as user selections in UI can't trigger script. QlikView does have disadvantages (mostly related to UI as you rightfully mentioned) but its performance is almost never among them.