Many vendors had started designing and selling the concept of OLAP(On-Line Analytical Processing) systems in the late 90's to provide better reporting of the interpretation of the data. The OLAP tools stored per-aggregated results unlike the pure database or the OLTP (On-Line Transacational Processing) systems.Tools like Hyperion Essbase, Cognos PowerPlay, were some of the prominent players in the market during the 90s. In the late 2000's SAP introduced SAP Business Warehouse to compete in the OLAP and Datawarehousing space.
There were 3 type of OLAP systems
OLAP tools were highly successful since it was an easy way to implement the business requirement with better results unlike the complex SQL query written on a relational database system. It was mandatory to define the KPI's and dimensions for modelling a cube and the models were not standardized then. Over the years, the data started growing in the OLAP systems and there was a constant need to improve the performance of such systems. SAP has introduced an boosted appliance hardware called BIA (Business Intelligence Accelerator) to improve the OLAP processing over the SAP BW system.
However, with the recent explosion of data in Terabytes and Petabytes, most of the above mentioned systems cannot scale to process the data and arrive at the business expected solutions. This has triggered few of the leaders in this space to work on in-memory databases which would be a true convergence of the OLAP and the OLTP system.
SAP has introduced the SAP HANA in 2011 for which Oracle tried to answer with Exadata. However, Exadata could not meet the bench marks provided by HANA. This has triggered Oracle to resurrect an acquisition product named "TimesTen" as an answer to the SAP's HANA solution. According to SAP, they would actually move all the processing capability from the application layer in SAP BW to the in-memory database layer like the conventional DB since the DB can process faster than the application layer. Many of the SAP customers were very much confused by this move from SAP especially considering that SAP did lot of marketing for the BW application level processing capabilities and the customers spend a lot of time and energy writing those models on the BW application layer.
On the SAP business side, It seems SAP has acquired nearly 200 customers with an average deal size of USD 600-800K for every license of which 10-20 customers have gone on production in the last 8 months.
There were 3 type of OLAP systems
- Multi-dimensional OLAP(M-OLAP): These systems had real multidimensional cubes defined within them. eg: Cognos Powerplay, Hyperion Essbase, Microsoft SSAS, SAS/MDDB, Oracle Express..etc
- Relational OLAP(R-OLAP): These systems were mainly modeled on relational star schema. eg: SAP BW, Microstrategy etc
- Hybrid-OLAP(H-OLAP): Most of the M-OLAP systems support this configuration. This is done by using relational star schema's for detailed level and multidimensional for the aggregation representation
OLAP tools were highly successful since it was an easy way to implement the business requirement with better results unlike the complex SQL query written on a relational database system. It was mandatory to define the KPI's and dimensions for modelling a cube and the models were not standardized then. Over the years, the data started growing in the OLAP systems and there was a constant need to improve the performance of such systems. SAP has introduced an boosted appliance hardware called BIA (Business Intelligence Accelerator) to improve the OLAP processing over the SAP BW system.
However, with the recent explosion of data in Terabytes and Petabytes, most of the above mentioned systems cannot scale to process the data and arrive at the business expected solutions. This has triggered few of the leaders in this space to work on in-memory databases which would be a true convergence of the OLAP and the OLTP system.
SAP has introduced the SAP HANA in 2011 for which Oracle tried to answer with Exadata. However, Exadata could not meet the bench marks provided by HANA. This has triggered Oracle to resurrect an acquisition product named "TimesTen" as an answer to the SAP's HANA solution. According to SAP, they would actually move all the processing capability from the application layer in SAP BW to the in-memory database layer like the conventional DB since the DB can process faster than the application layer. Many of the SAP customers were very much confused by this move from SAP especially considering that SAP did lot of marketing for the BW application level processing capabilities and the customers spend a lot of time and energy writing those models on the BW application layer.
On the SAP business side, It seems SAP has acquired nearly 200 customers with an average deal size of USD 600-800K for every license of which 10-20 customers have gone on production in the last 8 months.
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