The "Performance" or be more precise the response time of an analytical system to the business user is considered as one of the most critical aspects of Business Intelligence in a corporation which has to deal with tens, hundreds or thousand of millions of transactions to be managed and analyzed within the historical scope of an analytical application. The tuning process of such environments is only one aspect, and it is usually done to cure a suboptimal system setup.

To achieve a well performing analytical environment, the "tuning" starts already in the design phase, which is probably the most important step of this aspect. We strongly believe in "Performance by Design" and our experience has shown us that a lot of headaches will not even appear if this part of the job has been done well. This requires a very detailed technical understanding of the processes that are executed in the system, not only from a reporting perspective but also from a data load and data flow perspective. In order to maintain a high flexibility and good system response times, efficient redesign and recovery methods have to be implemented using highly performant data processnig logic and business rules.

Recent achievements of our work in this area are:

- Improving by factor 20 the data throughput of a Business Content staging logic by optimizing the standard staging logic and the buffering mechanisms delivered with the Business Content.

 

- Improving by factor 35 the time required for a complete reconstruction of an 80 million record infocube by redesigning its data model and an optimization of the usage of the available HW resources and buffering mechanisms.

New technologies like InMemory Databases are not only a very promising approaches anymore, some of them work in production with extraordinary results. The Business Warehouse Accelarator (BWA) was the first product of SAP in this direction. The aquisition of Sybase with its product SybaseIQ and the research results achieved by the Hasso-Plattner-Institute are clear indicators for this revolutionary change. But they are still not a complete cure as data has to be brought into them and their quick recovery in case of failures or redesign has to be guaranteed.

In any case: If you experience problems in this area, suffering problems with the user acceptance due to performance problems or if you want to achieve "Performance by Design", please talk to us. We are sure that we can help you.