The German applications powerhouse has generally released its memory-resident SAP BI Accelerator analytic engine. The company initially shipped the product as a limited release to around 30 select customers last October.
BI Accelerator is best described as a hybrid relational and multidimensional, memory-centric OLAP product that is ideally suited to work against 100 gigabyte-plus data marts. It uses SAP’s TREX search engine technology to perform in-memory index scans. While TREX was introduced originally for knowledge management applications, it has been continuously has been enhanced for use in BI environments.
BI Accelerator works by pushing a compressed InfoCube, which is a SAP-specific star/snowflake-schema data structure into RAM, against which full table scans can be run offering lightning quick performance and query response times. By doing so it avoids the bottleneck associated with conventional disk-based access.
Walldorf-based SAP claims that early customers have reported query performance times of 20 to 200 times faster than conventional BI tools.
SAP said it worked closely with chip maker Intel Corp to develop BI Accelerator, which is positioned as a dedicated appliance offering – meaning that it comes pre-installed on 64-bit Intel Xeon processor-based blade servers from IBM Corp and Hewlett-Packard Co.
SAP also develops LiveCache which is also a memory-centric technology that is being used in demand and supply planning as part of the mySAP Supply Chain Management system.
SAP said that customers implementing SAP xApp composite applications would stand to benefit from faster business insights as a result of BI Accelerator.
SAP generally released BI Accelerator at its recent Sapphire user conference in Orlando.
