Birst Aims for Analytics Sweet Spot with In-Memory Database

Ann All

Updated · Dec 14, 2011

While a growing number of vendors are introducing in-memory solutions to help companies get more bang for their business intelligence bucks, Birst co-founder and CEO Brad Peters said not enough of them are offering options that strike the right balance between functionality and price. His company hopes to fill that gap with a new in-memory analytics database built on Birst’s data warehouse automation technology.

Unlike Oracle’s Exalytics or SAP’s HANA, Peters says Birst’s SQL-based, columnar database does not require costly hardware investments and will run on any platform. Yet it offers the kind of functionality not available in tools at the lower end of the market that he says are little more than “souped-up versions of Excel” because of their inability to support complex queries.

“Real BI is relational and allows users to navigate all data relationships”, he says. “The combination of Birst’s open SQL interface, data compression and highly parallel processing, allows organizations to perform analytics that scale beyond associative data modeling at a fraction of the cost of larger in-memory database vendors.”

The target audience for the in-memory database is “organizations big enough to know what large enterprises have but small enough they can’t afford it,” Peters says.

Single node implementations of the Birst In-Memory Analytics Database are included in the Birst business analytics platform at no additional charge. The database will be generally available next month.

Birst will present more information on its In-Memory Analytics Database during a live webinar on Jan. 19 at 1 p.m. ET. You can register for the webinar here. 

Ann All
Ann All

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