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March 23, 2007
Lure of the Multifunctions
An increasing number of vendors (particularly those positioned in Operational BI) are advocating their low-latency data stores as a way of monitoring Key Performance Indicators from various enterprise sources. Vendors typically name this their “Analytic Engine” which provides such features as:
- Agents that collect, filter and transform content from various sources (databases, messages, applications)
- Memory-resident (or disk if the recovery option is turned on) storage of information harnessed by the above Agents
- Business rules that set off actions (such as Alerts) when certain conditions are met
Although such solutions may provide a method for an organization to be up and running quickly because the extraction, storage, business rules & presentations (sometimes even the hardware) are all packaged together, their true role in the Enterprise needs to be closely examined.
Upon reflection one may come to the conclusion that these solutions do not openly compete with the Enterprise Data Warehouse yet they may be furtively discouraging the organization from making the larger investment in building a comprehensive reporting infrastructure based on a relational data model. Each of the functions provided by these products assumes the role of some part of the EDW stack:
| Function | Replaces |
| Agents | ETL |
| Store | Database |
| Business Rules | SQL |
However organizations need to realize that the price of this seeming simplicity and accelerated delivery may by be these solutions’ inability to handle complexity and their less than enterprise-class performance and scalability characteristics.
Conversely as activity increases in the EDW space, (Netezza IPO announcement and DATAllegro 3.0 release) , EDW vendors should take note of what these vendors are up to and respond by including greater presentation and analysis capabilities in their stacks to avoid losing customer mind-share.
Posted by Arshak Navruzyan at March 23, 2007 11:59 PM
