There seems to be a connection between enterprise software billionaires and sail racing. Larry prefers the bigger boats, while Hasso prefers getting wet:

For Plattner, sailing two man dinghies and jumping off his 505 into chest-high water to prevent it from getting racked on the beach at Crissy Field is a far cry from having a professional crew guide a Farr 40 or his MaxZ yacht into a slip at Porto Cervo or another yachting Mecca. ‘The 505 is a great boat and it offers the most competitive racing available. I love the 505,’ said Plattner.

‘Hasso Plattner and Peter Alarie (GER) Race 9, 2007 SAP 5O5 World Championships’ Sail-World.com /AUS ©

If you don’t know anything about 5O5 racing, a video is available that gives a great overview of last year’s 5O5 World sailing championship in San Francisco, including Hasso’s team:

SAP sponsors the event, and provides competitors with access to information that helps them understand their performance, and how it compares to the other teams. Here’s a interview with US 5O5 sailors earlier this year, on the impact of SAP solutions on their racing:

In particular, last year’s competitors had access to SAP BusinessObjects dashboards packed with information about the conditions of each race:

Ryan Goodman explained in a blog post last year  how they were created, using a a combination of SAP BusinessObjects Dashboard Design (formerly Xcelsius), and the Centigon Solutions GMaps Plugin:

“Based on date/time inputs and wind prediction inputs, the dashboard retrieves data from Local Knowledge software to plot ocean currents (yellow lines). The strength and direction of the current is visualized in a visual grid within the Google Map. Upwind laylines (red dots) are controlled by current, wind, and a profile based on the 5O5 boats. Local Knowledge software does all of the heavy lifting and returns laylines and currents through a custom web service.”

“Monitoring execution is the second challenge not easily achieved as conditions change. While the strategy tab relies on user input for wind conditions and a starting point, which ultimately affects the course itself, the race tab presents real-time views of this information . Real time GPS locations of all boats and marks (marks shown as red pins) are provided via Trac-Trac. On the fly, the dashboard retrieves laylines and routes based on real time information including wind conditions. Trac-Trac also provides additional information for each boat including boat direction and position.”

The video below from SAP TV explains the solution in more detail:

Business Intelligence software and sailing – two worlds apart? Not at the SAP 5O5 world championship. For the first time ever, SAP is contributing solutions from the SAP Business Objects portfolio to support sailors. An exciting demonstration of the similarities of business and sailing.

This year’s pre-worlds championships started this week in Aarhus, Denmark. There will be 120 teams from 11 different nations attending and Joe King and his crack team of BusinessObjects technology experts are already on site, working on supporting the sailors’ analytic needs.

The official championship starts on Friday the 30th, and you will be able to follow the action live on the official SAP 5O5 World Championship 2010 web site: http://www.505sapworldchampionship2010.com/, and access the dashboard using the “SAP Analysis” button on the left hand side:

Hasso Plattner, SAP’s co-founder, chairman, and “Chief Software Advisor” has been giving a series of talks including his keynote at SAPPHIRE 2009 on why in his view “disk has become yesterday’s tape”, and why column storage and in-memory techniques are the future for both data warehousing AND enterprise applications, displacing the 20-year reign of relational databases.

Experts have advocated column databases such as Sybase IQ and LucidDB for data warehousing for many years.

But now, based on research done at the his Institute (and a lifetime of trying to get the best performance possible for enterprise applications), Plattner is advocating basing both OLAP and OLTP systems on column storage in order to eliminate the need for the cumbersome ETL process, and reduce system complexity and the number of database tables.

More details are available in his white paper A Common Database Approach for OLAP and OLTP Using an In-Memory Column Database and a related presentation. The research was conducted using SAP’s TREX technology and real customer data (to see what the technology can do in a business intelligence context, check out SAP BusinessObjects Explorer).

Given that the vast majority of relational databases are used for OLTP transactions today, this would represent a radical change for the enterprise application market.

And although data warehousing will still need to exist, because of master-data management, data synchronization, data quality, etc., it would certainly be a lot simpler, and a lot faster, since much of it could be done directly on the “transactional” data source.

While nobody has promised that SAP will develop the concept as a product, Plattner has presented his views widely to SAP employees, and leaves no doubt that he thinks this is the way ahead.

Here’s the last slide of Hasso’s presentation at the recent SIGMOD 2009 conference for database researchers – this is  certainly something that we’ve been looking forward to for a while…