In order to make Direct query more useful it needs to support data from more than one source.
A common requirement is to have a fairly small list of say customer ids from a campaign management system (lets say around 1000) and then need to match that list against transactions (we could be talking billions) to get total spend for those customers. The necessary integrations have not yet been made in the data warehouse and we just want to prototype the concept. Essentially what we need is for the 1000 customer ids to be pushed down to a direct query so that the join is performed in the data warehouse (dirty read only solution: use a very large IN clause; cleaner read/write solution: create a temp table for the customer ids and join). QlikSense can do this.
