Turbo-Charging Business Intelligence
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WHITE PAPER Turbo-Charging Business Intelligence www.sybase.com A smarter organization is a more effective and profitable organization, able to react more quickly to changes or make better decisions. That conviction is more and more widely held, as we see by the fast-growing adoption of analytics and business intelligence tools despite an otherwise sluggish market for enterprise technology. For example, Forrester Research reported in fall 2009 that 54 percent of the companies it surveyed already had BI implementations, and another 16 percent planned to follow suit in the next 12 months. But even though many BI and analytic solutions on the market today are powerful and feature-rich, they have a hard time satisfying users’ rising demands. Now that a typical enterprise database might contain 10 million rows of data, a single query and report could take literally hours — not acceptable in a world of just-in-time business decisions. And information analysis is no longer a matter of routine reports made at predictable daily, weekly, or monthly intervals by a limited group of specialists. Nowadays, line-of-business employees all around the organization expect to query the data themselves as needed, including unstructured, open-ended exploration to solve problems or look for new trends. Sometimes, even the smartest business analytics tool can use a turbo-charger. That’s one reason why SAP® bought Sybase a year ago — to make its SAP BusinessObjects BI and EIM (enterprise information management) solutions even faster and more perceptive, delivering real-time insights and predictive power in 1/20th of the time. This paper addresses how Sybase IQ and Complex Event Processing (CEP) technologies complement the portfolio of business analytics solutions from SAP. BIG DATA MEETS DATA DEMOCRACY Several trends have converged to make the kind of “turbo-charge” we deliver so important. 1. “Big Data.” Now that data storage hardware is cheap, organizations are eagerly recording terabytes of information — and in single, enormous databases that could contain many millions of rows. Consider all the varied products a national grocery chain carries, and how they sold at each store over the course of a year. Or all the stock portfolios of a major brokerage firm and how they’re performing, minute by minute. Once you’ve got all that raw data on hand, of course you want to mine it for as much insight as possible — but such massive queries can challenge even the fastest CPU and the best storage systems. 2. Democratization of data. For example, the ladies’ shoe buyer at a department store might examine whether a remake of “I, Claudius” is causing a run on gladiator sandals. Or an HR manager might compare absences in this year’s flu season to last year’s, to justify free vaccinations for the workforce. Even customers and partners might be looking at your data — say, to check the ETA of a new product shipment or the effectiveness of the marketing campaign you ran for them. In the past, if people like these had access to company data at all, it was probably in small data models sliced off the master database (or completely hidden behind reports “on request”). But now they want to draw directly from the source at the point when they want to make a decision, not wait for a report after the fact. This results in more current insights with more dimensions — a richer experience for the user of data — but also a lot more demand on the master database and its hardware platform. 3. Cost constraints. It’s not 2005 any more, and you can’t keep just buying servers and hiring more analysts or DBAs to improve performance. Any IT purchases you make had better deliver sizable ROI — and quickly. 4. Look forward, not back. A faster-changing and more inter-connected economy needs to move away from reporting — i.e. analyzing what happened in the past — to predicting what’s going to happen (based on current trends). Its technology needs to change from presenting a rearview mirror to a windshield showing the road ahead. THE DESIGN ADVANTAGES OF SYBASE SOLUTIONS Sybase IQ is the number one column-based analytics server on the market. It gives you unrivaled flexibility: Offload scheduled production reports from transactional systems or databases, do on-demand reporting, measure KPIs, predict business trends, and build executive dashboards. Sybase IQ has a design advantage: It stores and retrieves data by columns, not rows. Each column is stored separately; the data it contains is its own index (in contrast to the typical row-based architecture, where indexes and views need to be built on request, a time-consuming process). Since analytics questions involve columns (or attributes) rather than rows in a database, you only need to retrieve the columns that correspond to your query. x Moreover, Sybase IQ compresses and tokenizes the Conventional Database data, optimizing so it uses less space on disk and in c1 c2 c3 c4 c5 c6 c7 c8 c9 ... memory. This dramatically reduces the input/output burden on the processor, memory, and disk. Together, these features increase the query speed by up to 100 or even 1,000-fold compared to traditional row-based solutions such as Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle, or DB2. Sybase IQ The secret is that Sybase IQ organizes its data to solve analytic problems. Other analytic servers, c1 c2 c3 c4 c5 c6 c7 c8 c9 ... many dating back to the 1970’s, were focused on just recording data (transactions) as fast as possible while complex analytic retrieval was often expected to take hours or days. Sybase IQ was built to answer the hard questions in seconds. Database Designed for Analytics Also, Sybase IQ is already optimized to jet-propel the queries of SAP BusinessObjects solutions, compared to other analytic servers. It communicates smoothly with the semantic layer built into the SAP BusinessObjects BI 4.0 solutions released earlier this year, letting users query and federate data via an easily configured dashboard. The combined dashboard can easily analyze disparate or partitioned data sources, a business requirement few competitors can meet. And now that the two product lines are under one roof, you can get a complete best-of-breed technology stack from a single vendor — so buying and deploying a complete BI solution is faster, easier, and more affordable. LOOKING AT DATA AS A WATERFALL, NOT AN ICE CUBE Deriving business intelligence from data is hard enough when you’re studying historical results (last month’s assembly-line productivity or shoe sales). But the real challenge is analyzing enormous amounts of data while it’s streaming — data as a waterfall rather than an ice cube, so to speak. That’s where Sybase Aleri Streaming Processing comes in. Sybase Aleri is a complex event processing technology that lets you watch large data streams and set up proactive alerts in real time so you can act as needed. For example, you might want to be alerted when a stock price goes over or under a certain amount, or electricity demand on a hot afternoon rises past a particular threshold. COMPLEX EVENT PROCESSING Sybase CEP Alerts Steam Actions Data Stream Ultra low latency — Memory data answers in milliseconds Disk IQ Sybase IQ Send Data to the Queries Conventional Database Sybase Analytics c1 c2 c3 c4 c5 c6 c7 c8 c9 ... Ops Operational Intelligence — data answers in seconds Sybase IQ c1 c2 c3 c4 c5 c6 c7 c8 c9 ... Other High Performance Analytics — sources answers in minutes/hours Database Designed for Analytics 1 Multiply these individual decisions by each of the millions of utility customers or stock portfolios, and it’s time to automate. Sybase Aleri makes it possible by integrating your business processes with hundreds of thousands of events per second, and automates responses in an instant. Sybase Aleri can even process multiple streams of event data in real time, ensuring that you don’t miss a critical insight when it counts. You can imagine how helpful this kind of alert would be in a wide range of time-dependent industries: • Finances – such as portfolio management or currency trading • Utilities – “smart grids” that move energy around a region from where it’s generated — say, solar power farms in the desert — to cities where it’s in demand • Telecommunications – especially churn reduction to reduce customer defections from a carrier by identifying the ones who could be persuaded to stay by better incentives and “equipment optimization” figuring out from call patterns where new cell signal towers are needed • Retail – e.g. just-in-time inventory replenishment or predicting trends • Healthcare – e.g. spotting epidemics, or tracking patient reactions to new drugs • Defense and intelligence – where lives could depend on spotting one particular malefactor’s face among millions who pass through the nation’s airports on a given day BRINGING IT ALL TOGETHER, SAP BUSINESSOBJECTS DATA SERVICES SAP BusinessObjects BI brings this all together for rapid deployment and empowers teams to achieve fast results by allowing anyone in the organization self-service access to the data. This solution helps remove the system performance bottlenecks and unacceptable delays in business analysis due to data complexity and IT backlogs. Analysis Modeling Profiling Matching Cleansing ETL/CDC Calculate Models Presentation ANSWERS Data Preparation Data Usage IQ Sybase IQ SAP Sybase Sybase Sybase SAP EIM Rep Server CEP IQ BI / Apps Sybase PowerDesigner The combination of Sybase Analytics products with SAP BusinessObjects Data Services and Business Intelligence toolsets, delivers an integrated data infrastructure capability to turbo-charge Business Intelligence applications. SAP BusinessObject users can achieve unrivaled performance for analytics tasks such as reports, executive dashboards, ad hoc analysis, interpreting data streams in real time, predicting new business trends, and identifying problems.