Real-Time BI and Situational Analysis

In the past, data-warehouse systems served as information providers for key management members and knowledge workers; today, they are the central platform for the enterprise-wide integrated information provision. Aside from strategic analyses on historical data, this encompasses, above all, the submission of real-time data to operational processes. The clear separation of the operational and the analytical world, as it has been promoted until now, will thus become obsolete in the future. This development (i.e., the merging of the operational and the analytical world in context of Web technologies) is topic of this chapter. For this purpose, we take a closer look at current business intelligence (BI) and data warehouse trends from the perspective of both the applications and the database systems. We discuss scenarios which show the emerging trend to real-time business intelligence and present techniques that address the problems upcoming when building a real-time DWH. Additionally, we extend the concept of real-time business intelligence by the aspect of situational data analyses.