In-Memory Business Intelligence is rapidly changing the way users view their BI reporting tools. With the costs of processing power and memory in a steady free-fall the past decade or so, and with the rise of inexpensive 64-bit computer architectures, In-Memory BI is fast rising!
Inexpensive machines were all mostly 32-bit so far, like PCs. These days 64-bit architectures, servers and even desktops are fast replacing these older machines. It's a simple binary arithmetic truism that you can address a lot more locations in memory with 64 bits of address space than with 32-bits of address space!
Multi-dimensional cubes have been very useful in BI for a long time but they have been a royal pain in deciding ahead of time, what the dimensions need to be and updating the cells as the transactions are flowing in. Then you can get your reports sliced and diced - say Region-wise, Zone-wise, City-wise and then SKU or SKU first and then Regions, Zones and Cities. These are two very different reports providing very different information for you if you have used these in practice! But you were limited to the ways you organized your cubes upfront. What's better than organizing them at run-time when you need the reports? That's a lot fo flexibility you did not have before!
The problem with many of these kinds of approaches is that it is very difficult to predict these ahead of time. Sometimes you may come across some demographic information recently. You want to analyze this data in conjunction with your own Point of Sales data!
In-Memory BI tools and approaches allow the user to combine these kinds of ad-hoc analyses as they go without a lot of time-consuming set up in the background initially.
Still, it may not be possible to do In-memory Business Intelligence in every case. If some company has terabytes of just Point of Sale data, it will be futile to attempt in-memory BI in this case.
But the other 99.99% of businesses and reporting needs can easily be a better fit for in-memory BI than the traditional, build a data warehouse, populate and then report models of the past couple of decades.
In-memory BI combined with Visualization can very greatly enhance the ability of management to understand what is happening and base their decisions on that clearer understanding.
BI is fast changing and the rise of In-memory BI is a pivotal force in this change!
God gave us memory so that we might have roses in December - James Matthews Barrie
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