Hasso Plattner, SAP’s co-founder and current supervisory board chairman, has been known to fly high in his keynote address at the company’s annual Sapphire user conference. This year, Plattner took a high-flying concept, the growing in-memory database market, and brought it down to earth for all to see. And what attendees saw was the beginning of a major revolution in database design, cost, and performance — and the beginning of a major headache for anyone addicted to the aging relational database model.
At the core of Plattner’s mini-lecture on databases were two not-so-new technologies that SAP has been busy blending together. The first is the column-based database, a method of storing and accessing data that has two major benefits: It requires much less space to store a given amount of raw data than a relational database, and it is self-indexed, eliminating the overhead for indexing, which can more than double the size of a relational database. Column-based databases are also dead-simple to update, both in terms of their structure and their content, unlike a relational database, which needs to be “reprogrammed” every time its structure changes.
SAP has been moving this column-based capability into memory, the second not-so-new technology playing a central role in SAP’s latest effort. Plattner showed off a $6,000 rack-based system with 144 gigabytes of RAM. That’s enough RAM to load up a column-based database that would require 2 terabytes as a relational database.
And then the fun began. Plattner demonstrated SAP’s new Explorer analytical interface in order to show how fast this in-memory, column-based database can crank out analysis. Explorer has some lovely, natural-language features, but its most impressive feature was its ability to process 280 million records in under a second, powered by SAP’s column-based, in-memory database. For anyone trying to analyze massive quantities of data, it was an impressive show. (For the record, it can process 400 million records in under a second, though that was not what the demonstration showed.)