Business IQ download

Business IQ Deployment Page

This page will assist you in understanding system requirements, deployment options and review necessary privileges required to install Business IQ.

Please take a moment to verify the following requirements below under Equipment Recommendations and Requirements.

Detailed deployment options below including dataset size, public and private modes of operation, and user roles.

Equipment Recommendations and Requirements:

Operating systems

Windows XP/Vista 32/64-bit

Windows Server 2003 32/64 bit

Required (not included): Microsoft Excel 2000 or above

Recommended processor speed: 1.0 Ghz or above

Recommended memory size: 1 Gigabyte or above

Recommended disk size: 20 Gigabytes or above

A detailed system evaluation can be performed on request.

Downloading and Installing Business IQ

Follow the link below to install Business IQ and apply recent patches and enhancements.

You will need administrative privileges to install Business IQ. Biq should be installed within the users profile with administrator rights granted temporarily. Once complete administrator rights may be revoked.

Business IQ Download Page

Back to Updates and Patches

Technical System requirements

Users of the BIQ software are divided into two groups: consumers and publishers. Consumers use the BIQ Viewer to browse and analyze data. This data is prepared by publishers using the BIQ Loader. In many cases, the same person or persons perform these two functions. If you are both a publisher and a consumer, then follow the guidelines set forth for publishers. If you are a consumer, then follow the consumer guidelines.

Estimating dataset size

For both publishers and consumers, the system requirements vary by several factors:

The number of transactions in the dataset
The number of dimensions the dataset
Total nodes (entries) in all of the dimensions

The most critical resource is RAM. If you have too little, your machine will spend most of its time swapping, and little or no useful work will get done. Unfortunately, estimating RAM is quite complicated. The following table provides a rough size estimation based on the factors listed above. If you need a more detailed analysis, please contact IQ-West. We have tools to help calculate more exact requirements based on your dataset parameters.

Use the following table to size your dataset, then use the tables in later sections to identify your specific system requirements.

		Dimension element count
		10k	100k	500k	3M
Transaction Count	100k	Small	Small	Medium	Large
	1M	Small	Medium	Medium	Large
	3M	Medium	Medium	Large	Very Large
	5-nM	Medium	Large	Very Large	Very Large

Publisher guidelines

The following table provides estimated system requirements for publishers, based on dataset size.

	Dataset size
	Small	Medium	Large	Very large
CPU	733mhz	1ghz	2ghz	>2+ghz quad processor
RAM	384mb	512mb	2gb	4gb or more. switch 32 bit mode to 64
Free disk after BIQ install	2gb	4gb	10gb	20gb or high speed disk array

Consumer guidelines

The following table provides estimated system requirements for consumers, based on dataset size.

	Dataset size
	Small	Medium	Large	Very large
CPU	733mhz	1ghz	1ghz	2ghz
RAM	256mb	512mb	1gb	1-2gb
Free disk after BIQ install	1gb	2gb	4gb	6gb

Licensing

Each copy of BIQ has a unique license key. License keys are of the form:

xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx

where "x" can be any digit from 0 to 9, or a letter from a to f. Type your license key exactly as printed, with dashes, when prompted for it. There are no lower-case "L" (ELL) characters in the license key. Such characters are ONEs, not ELLs.

You'll need to enter the license key once when first using BIQ. It is unlikely, but there are circumstances where you'll be asked to enter a new license key. In order to do this, a license key management function is available from the Admin menu.

Deployment options

When deploying BIQ for use by multiple users, there are two models to consider: (1)
multiple desktops, with reference datasets published to shares, and (2) client/server,
where a reference read-only dataset is available to all users. See "Security and
deployment considerations", below, for a more detailed view.

Multiple users/Private Mode

The advantage to this is that every user has the ability to manipulate his/her own dataset privately, without impacting any other user. A possible disadvantage is that undisciplined users might alter their datasets so radically that their results start to differ from one another. This mode is ideal for power users who are sharing a reference dataset. Note that BIQ's collaboration tools can be used to synthesize changes from multiple power users into a new reference dataset.

Multiple users/Public Mode

In this mode, each user has the ability to operate on a read-only dataset that s/he cannot
change. One or more users can be granted the ability to change this dataset, but only by
first taking the dataset to single-user mode (thus locking everyone else out) while the
changes are being made. Power users can simultaneously be granted the ability to
operate their own read/write copy of the dataset on the same server, subject to server
bandwidth and memory limitations.
This mode is useful for situations where the dataset is too large to fit on ordinary laptop
or desktop computers. It is also useful when there is an administrative desire to freeze a
particular reference dataset in place, so that "ordinary" users must access only the
reference dataset, and cannot change it.