"BI/DW Is Moving Away From Decisional To Operational"

Haridas Nair, director, Emerging Technologies, Information Technology Solutions Group, Sybase talks to Biztech2 about the evolution of data warehousing and shares his views on owning a successful BI/DW environment.

For a very long time now, your BI strategy has revolved around Sybase IQ, how has is it worked out for you so far?

It has panned out very well for us. IQ has proved to be the key to our success and growth in the BI arena.

IQ’s success lies in its ability to greatly accelerate the response time for BI/DW systems. In case of ad hoc queries, it can deliver answers up to 100 times faster than most other databases in the market. This is made possible by our patented storage and management system which we’ve developed through our efforts. By leveraging techniques that compress the data by up to 70%, Sybase IQ not only trims down the operating costs but can also scale up to handle hundreds of different data sources and multitude of users.

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It is for these reasons that Sybase IQ is fast becoming the offering of choice for companies looking to improve the agility of their business intelligence (BI) systems. And it’s not going to end there because the BI market is only going to grow over the course of next few years as more and more companies continue to realise its importance and criticality in their daily operations.

What are some implications of the growing importance of Business Intelligence for data warehousing technologies?

Today, Business Intelligence/Data Warehousing is moving away from decisional to operational. This essentially means that the questions asked of the warehouse are evolving from “What happened?” to “What is happening?” and “What will happen?"

The growing importance of BI is affecting warehousing technologies in more than one way. For instance, data warehouses today have to be well equipped to handle increased query demands (predefined to ad-hoc), higher number of users and ever-increasing data volumes running into terabytes. Not only this but, it has to do all this at considerably reduced latency windows and lower maintenance costs.

Data Warehousing technology is evolving to keep up with these requirements with improvements in query processing, scaling across low cost hardware, non-stop DW technology, data compression, fast data loads, support for low-cost hard disks for storage and archiving.

What according to you are some of the essentials for a successful BI/DW environment?

There are two parts to this answer - technology and business.

At a technology level, a BI/DW environment is truly successful when it holds a single version of the truth for the business. It has to support multiple subject areas. It needs to support normalised schemas without compromising on performance and be able to handle mixed workloads such as ad-hoc, planned, simple, complex, atomic data, summary data well.

Also it has to be able to scale in multiple dimensions i.e. DW data size, number of users, commodity or new hardware.

At a business level, the criteria is simply judged by elements such as performance and whether it “works” or not. Also, the infrastructure cost required to run it shouldn’t be enormous and it has to satisfy user needs.

What do you see happening over the course of next few years as far as database technologies are concerned?

The way we see it, there will be continued innovation and simplification in 3 critical areas in the next few years. These will be Data Preparation and Loading, Data Analysis Engine and Data Models and Front-End Analysis Tools.

Innovation continues in the area of preparing, transforming and loading data with a focus on making the data loads continuous. There is significant innovation on performance, scaling and handling very large sets of data with the analysis engine, while delivering predictable performance. Visualisation of large data sets will be another area that will be a key focus.

Additionally we expect to see continued innovation in bundling of different pieces of technology to improve the customer integration efforts.