First Look at the New SAP BusinessObjects Exploration Views Prototype

SAP have just announced a new Exploration Views prototype, based on the BusinessObjects Explorer platform. It builds on the core strengths of Explorer (easy-to-use interface and fast, in-memory calculations) with more options for business people to customize and share their own views of the data, without requiring help from IT. Exploration views is exactly what its name suggests: instead of having just a single view of the data in Explorer as you... [Read More...]

OLAP is Dead (Long Live Analytics)

The term OLAP or Online Analytic Processing was coined in 1993 by relational database technology pioneer Ted Codd (my claim to fame: we went to the same high school, Poole Grammar). The term was chosen to contrast with OLTP or online transaction processing, and was prompted by some clever marketing folks at Essbase, who wanted to promote their multidimensional database product. Codd was famous for his twelve rules defining the relational model and... [Read More...]

The End of Relational Databases?

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... [Read More...]