I’ve seen this this “No Cube No Data Warehouse, effortless BI” sales claim before. Years ago one of Microstrategy’s “strenghts” (according to sales people) were “no cubes” and a “pure HTML” front end.. So what?. Microstrategy is a great product and its still around but ROLAP its ROLAP approach requires both serious database tuning and aggregate tables. An additional cost ignored by the uninformed customer. Cubes (like Microsoft’s or Cognos) can be very powerful and can do the type of analysis you show here easily. Of course, as with any other BI tool, development is faster and simpler with a good data warehouse in the back office.

Now QlikView claims results in weeks and even days and that can be very misleading. I’m sure you can hook it up to the source tables of any database in a day or less, but so could yo do with almost any other BI software out there. It’s approach is interesting and those dashboards look good but some serious effort will, eventually, have to be done in the back end gathering data in a proper data warehouse.