Sunday, February 11, 2007

BI without the Data Warehousing

Gartner's BI Platform Quadrant for Q1 2007

Gartner's magic quadrants are always interesting, even if you don't believe them. The most recent BI quadrant puts Micro$oft and Qliktech closing in a bit more on industry leaders Cognos et cetera. Read it here: Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence Platforms, 1Q07.

Thursday, February 1, 2007

Analyses in-memory ...

QlikTech has an interesting approach to dashboarding. It's in Version 7 and has the typical features: alerts, support for HTML, and so on). But it's the approach to OLAP ... or it's non-approach to OLAP ... that intrigues me. You see, QlikView runs in memory and not on OLAP. And it can be used with operational data without the need for pre-aggregation ... something BI tools usually require. So it parses the input data and extracts metadata that describes relationships between those various data elements. The bottom line is that performance is better; you don't have pre-defined dimensions or hierarchies; you don't have to ask IT to rebuild your OLAP cube when you want to run a query that requires a design change; and you can perform drill-downs in a way that would be otherwise too "expensive" in processing terms. Obviously, it means that you gotta have a lot of memory, but that's pretty cheap these days.


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