OpenQVD

A free, open, clean-room specification and implementation of the Qlik QVD binary file format.

OpenQVD is derived purely by binary analysis of a public corpus of ~1,100 .qvd files gathered from GitHub (see QVD-Sources). It ships no Qlik code or binaries, and reading or writing a .qvd file never requires QlikView, Qlik Sense, or any other Qlik product to be installed.

Why

QVD is Qlik's native columnar export format, but reading one outside the Qlik ecosystem otherwise means round-tripping through a Qlik install. OpenQVD lets the data science and data engineering community read and write .qvd files directly from Rust, Python, or a standalone CLI.

What you get

• A Rust reader and writer (openqvd crate) that parses 1,044 of 1,047 valid public corpus files and round-trips 1,093 of 1,093 semantically.
• Python bindings (openqvd on PyPI) built on PyArrow, with first-class Polars, Pandas, and DuckDB integration.
• Projection and predicate pushdown: skip symbol-table decoding for unrequested columns, and filter before row decoding.
• A single-binary openqvd CLI for quick inspection and format conversion.
• SPEC.md: a from-scratch specification of the XML header, symbol tables, and bit-packed row encoding, covered in Format.

Get started

• Install
• CLI quickstart
• Rust quickstart
• Python quickstart