At Sapphire in May, SAP has introduced the accelerated version of SAP BusinessObjects Explorer. It combines a very intuitive user interface with the speed of an in-memory database that answers arbitrary queries within seconds.

The user interface is so easy to use that random people like me are able to handle it. (I am an application engineer, not a BI expert.) If you don’t believe me, I strongly encourage you to try it out yourself with the public demo from SAP, where you can explore data from microfinance. Even if you have no experience with business intelligence systems, you will find that you can easily answer the questions of the quiz game about micro-financing.

What makes this demo outstanding is the fact that the displayed data is not pre-computed and stored as aggregates, but the data is aggregated on-the-fly. This approach results in great flexibility as the system does not need to know in advance, which sort of questions a user might ask. Technically, this has been realized by keeping all data in memory of a set of blade servers with Intel® Xeon® processors X5570 (code-named Nehalem-EP). The SAP in-memory technology compresses the data and distributes it for parallel processing by multiple cores and blades with a shared-nothing approach. Using the features of modern multi-core processors, this literally enables business intelligence at the speed of thought.

I am very excited that we are now able to show you the software that make this possible running on our next generation 4-socket servers, code-named Nehalem-EX: At the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco, I will staff a booth featuring this software., which was set up by my dear colleague Roman Dementiev. Given the great scalability of the software, it can take full advantage of the new architecture and I will be happy to show it to you.

CU@IDF

Thomas

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