I wrote about SAP’s BI Accelerator quite a bit in my white paper on memory-centric data management, but otherwise I seem not to have posted much about it here. In essence, it’s a product that’s all RAM-based, and generally geared for multi-hundred-gigabyte data marts. The basic design is a compression-heavy column-based architecture, evolved from SAP’s text-indexing technology TREX. Like data warehouse appliances, it eschews indexing, relying instead on blazingly fast table scans.
BI accelerator today has been proven to work, and more importantly to live up to its promises. Several customers already went live with BI accelerator, and even more customers completed a POC already. The latter include names such as BP, Novartis, Brown-Foreman, and Coca Cola. The benefits customers cite are: (1) consistently fast performance, without dedicated tuning efforts, (2) new level of flexibility, (3) easy to deploy. Separately, in a lab test Winter Corporation confirmed the performance results, when they tested a 1.2 billion row retail scenario.
Great product, shame about the software cost. It can’t be right that the software costs 4 times the hardware! For us, this has made the product completely unviable.
Such a crucial technology should be a base part of the Netweaver license, or at worst a one-time worst a one-time charge regardless of the number of blades it runs on.
Let’s look at the upside of BI Accelerator for a moment… Today users are familiar with the speed of the consumer Web, and expect similar response times from BI applications. With traditional DBMS centric models being not up to that task, IT attempted to solve this problem with the “kill with iron” approach – throwing tons of hardware at the challenge. That was a very expensive proposition, with often only mediocre results. With BI Accelerator, a fundamentally new approach has been taken, combining benefits of hardware (latest chips) and software (latest innovations) and maximizing synergies in a new “appliance” model. In summary, costs are typically significant lower than with traditional approaches (increased or specialty hardware) – with by far superior results for the business.