HyDash: A dashboard for real-time business intelligence based on the hyPer Main memory database system

Abstract

Business Intelligence (BI) is a set of techniques that help improve business decision making. From a technical point of view, BI relies on a set of tools which includes performance dashboards: layered services that combine monitoring, analysis, and reporting. However, most dashboard solutions today are based on data warehouses which face a problem of data staleness-a circumstance caused by the separation of transactional and analytical processing. Novel hybrid main memory database systems such as SAP's HANA or HyPer overcome this issue and achieve best-of-breed transaction processing throughput and analytical query response times in one system in parallel on the same database state. In this work, we contribute HyDash, a web-based dashboard for real-time business intelligence. HyDash visualizes key performance indicators (KPIs) based on predefined SQL queries and provides an ad-hoc SQL query interface to dynamically extend the scope of the dashboard. HyDash relies on (i) hybrid main memory database systems and (ii) a push-based query result update mechanism based on the novel HTML5 WebSockets.