In-memory data management: An inflection point for enterprise applications

In the last 50 years, the world has been completely transformed through the use of IT. Today, it is seeing a new inflection point: In a newly published book titled In-Memory Data Management - An Inflection Point for Enterprise Applications, Prof. Hasso Plattner, co-founder of business software company SAP, and his deputy professor Dr. Alexander Zeier illustrate for the first time how in-memory technology will radically change business processes and the way businesses are run in the near future. Enabling processing of very large amounts of data in real time, in-memory technology is the result of high-tech research at the Hasso Plattner Institute (HPI) and SAP AG. Together with current hardware developments, the technology paves the way for fundamental innovations in business and the IT industry.

Today, enterprise data is split into separate databases for performance reasons. Analytical data resides in data or business warehouses, synchronized periodically with transactional (ERP) systems. This separation makes real-time reporting on current data impossible. Multi-core CPUs, large main memories, and cloud computing are now laying the foundation for the transition of enterprises away from this restrictive model. The book In-Memory Data Management comprehensively shows how new database technology can use fast, flexible analyses in 'real time' to facilitate entrepreneurial decision-making for top managers and users and can accelerate business processes by up to a factor of 1,000 at present. The book is printed in English by scientific publishing house Springer.

The book describes the techniques that allow analytical and transactional processing at the speed of thought and enable new ways of doing business. It lays out concepts for distributing the database solution SanssouciDB over several servers and for running it on a single high-performance system. The use of SanssouciDB in cloud computing is also illustrated.

Prominent international figures in science and business see in-memory technology as a milestone for large-scale IT systems. It is the key technology for a new era of business management in which managers can base their decisions on real-time analyses of complex business data. Written by the inventors of the technology, Hasso Plattner, chairman of SAP's supervisory board and head of the HPI research group Enterprise Platform and Integration Concepts, along with Alexander Zeier, the book for the first time presents in-memory data management in its full context.

The book is written primarily for university students, IT professionals and IT managers, but is also designed for senior management who wish to use in-memory computing to improve existing business processes and open up new areas of applying this technology.

Provided by Springer