Blog: William McKnight

« RFID podcast | Main | Fall Speaking Schedule »

Operational BI: Celequest

Well, we have analytical business intelligence, usually implemented with a batch-loaded multi-source data warehouse. Then, there’s operational reporting, usually done with direct access to a singular operational system. But in between there’s operational business intelligence, which can be multi-source with some, well, intelligence, applied to the results.

EII is a viable option when you don’t need the results instantiated (i.e., for throw-away queries). BAM, which stands for Business Activity Monitoring – a primary purpose of operational business intelligence - is a category of operational business intelligence which does instantiate the results. I had a chance to catch up with Steve Smythe of Celequest recently and learn more about their “Lava” offering, which is actually an operational business intelligence “appliance.” They sell or lease you the box for operational BI. Excellent performance on the queries should come from the fact that the data is stored in memory. Box sizes range from 4 GB to 16 GB. This could be a good solution when operational decisions need to be made before the data can hit the data warehouse and when operational query/reporting simply won’t work.

This is one of the trends taking cycles away from the data warehouse and taking reasons away from having a single, monolithic global data warehouse. Another I have blogged about is the calculations for master data. EII is also a strong contender as we go forward.

Share: