In-Memory Analytics
In-Memory Analytics
In-memory analytics is a methodology that queries data in the system’s RAM (Random Access Memory) instead of physical disks. A shorter query response time of up to three or four times that of physical disk query searches allows business intelligence and analytics applications to support substantially faster business decisions. This can help increase productivity as well as reducing costs by possible reduced head count. Since RAM costs are decreasing every year, in-memory analytics are becoming a very real option whereas in the past this option was seen as too costly. These exceptionally fast query responses help reduce or eliminate the need for data indexing and pre-aggregated data in OLAP cubes or aggregate tables (Rouse). This process helps reduce IT costs as traditional warehouses may only be used for storing data and not running queries in the future.
This topic is related to what we were learning in class with running queries in MySQL. In our case we were not dealing with databases that were remarkably large, but in real world examples databases may contain hundreds of millions of data entries. In-memory analytics is simply a more efficient way of running queries than the way we used in class; there is no change to the way the query is entered. Queries that would take an hour to perform would merely take minutes.
An example of how in-memory analytics can be best utilized is for big data. If we are a company such as MasterCard with hundreds of millions of transactions and millions of customer data that gets collected annually, running queries on this data would take hours to get the information you need to find. With in-memory analytics, there can be up to 1 TB of addressable memory to cache large volumes of data. This technology allows querying of an entire data warehouse to be done inside a computer’s RAM. So, for an example, if we wanted to collect the last 10 transactions from every credit card of every customer that is constantly being updated up-to-the-minute, this is a query that must be accessed quickly and can only be done in the computer’s RAM.
Bibliography
Rouse, Margaret. “What Is In-memory Analytics ? – Definition from WhatIs.com.”
SearchBusinessAnalytics. N.p., n.d. Web. 23 Apr. 2015.