Qlik's in-memory associative database is the proprietary technology that Qlik invented in 1993 in Lund, Sweden, which allows large amounts of data to be compressed, stored in the RAM, and rapidly traversed in the Qlik Sense client. In other words, this is what makes Qlik, Qlik.

This database houses all of the data we need inside the Qlik Engine and allows us to explore the datasets in a way that facilitates analytics in a much better manner. We'll get into how and why this approach is better in the next section, The Associative Engine.