Towards agile BI: applying in-memory technology to data warehouse architectures

Abstract

Confronted with increased market dynamics and hence frequently changing system environments, today's decision support systems face the demand to respect such developments. Developing and maintaining so called agile business intelligence (BI) systems is a major challenge for information technology and organizations, since the underlying assumption of BI is to support mostly long term decisions in a non-volatile and integrated way. Hence, current approaches towards agility often focus on shortened implementation times using agile methods like Ex- treme Programming (XP) or Scrum. Given the existing BI architectures and environments, these methods are not fully applicable. Thus, this paper focuses on the architecture of agile BI. To achieve this goal, we derive criteria for agile BI. Then, a semi-virtual data warehouse architecture with an in-memory database (IMDB) as a technology enabler for agile BI is proposed conceptually.