Finally, A Real Business Intelligence System Is at Hand

In this chapter, we offer our most important insights regarding operational and analytical systems from a business perspective. We describe how they can be unified to create a fast combined system. We also discuss how benchmarking can be changed to evaluate the unified system from both an operational and analytical processing perspective. As we saw earlier, it used to be possible to perform Business Intelligence (BI) tasks on a company’s operational data. By the end of the 90s, however, this was no longer possible as data volumes had increased to such an extent that executing long-running analytical queries slowed systems down so much that they became unusable. BI solutions thus evolved over the years from the initial operational systems through to the current separation into operational and analytical domains. As we have seen, this separation causes a number of problems. Benchmarking systems have followed a similar trajectory, with current benchmarks measuring either operational or analytical performance, making it difficult to ascertain a systems true performance. With IMDB technology we now have the opportunity to once again reunite the operational and analytical domains. We can create BI solutions that analyze a company’s up-to-the-minute data without the need to create expensive secondary analytical systems. We are also able to create unified benchmarks that give us a much more accurate view of the performance of the entire system. This chapter describes these two topics in detail. In Sect. 7.1 , we cover the evolution of BI solutions from the initial operational systems through the separation into two domains, and then we give a recommendation regarding the unification of analytical and operational systems based on in-memory technology. In Sect. 7.2 , we examine benchmarking across the operational and analytical domains.