Re: Does Oracle have anything like SAP Business Intelligence Accelerator?

On 2008-11-09, zigzagdna_at_yahoo.com <zigzagdna_at_yahoo.com> wrote: ...
>
> Here is a quote from SAP CTO Vishal Sikka on BUsiness Intelligence:
>
> "More recent work in business intelligence demonstrates that when it
> comes to analytics, a great way to achieve performance improvements
> and lower costs, is to organize data by columns in memory, instead of
> rows in a disk-based RDBMS. Now we can perform aggregation and other
> analytical operations on the fly within these main-memory structures.
> Working together with engineers from Intel, our Trex and BI teams
> achieved massive performance and cost improvements in our highly
> successful BIA product. We are now taking this work a lot further; in
> looking at ways to bring processing and state close together
> elastically, and on the fly, and by looking at ways that the
> application design can be altered so that we can manage transactional
> state safely, and yet achieve real-time up-to-date analytics without
> expensive and time-consuming movement of data into data warehouses via
> ETL operations. "

So it's an in-memory optimisation for the specific application, and not anything to do with the database at all. It's been done lots of times (not that specific thing, just the concept), and what usually happens is that in a few years database and hardware improvements catch up with the optimisation to the point where doing it is no longer worthwhile.

But it's off-topic for c.d.o.s.

There are people working with the idea of using column-wise storage for the physical layer of an RDBMS, but I doubt that any existing major product will change its entire disk-storage strategy anytime soon, so I guess that's off-topic here as well.

E Received on Sun Nov 09 2008 - 11:34:04 CST