Data Warehousing and Business Intelligence: Benchmark Project for the Platform Selection

Abstract

The growth in importance of Data Warehousing (DW) and Business Intelligence (BI) has dramatically changed the IT landscape. The unprecedented rate of growth of information and raw data, coupled with ever accelerating escalation of competitiveness in business and government agencies, created never experienced before pressure on the IT executives to fulfill ever growing need of their internal clients for the prompt and accurate information. At the same time, new phenomena of open source have open opportunities to the medium and small companies of participating in the endeavor of BI. This newly revolutionized IT landscape seeks for a more systematic methodology of selecting platforms for DW/BI environment. The need for proper architecting of that environment with the need of balancing the performance level versus the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) inspired us to propose a formalized model of benchmarking that would combine the transparency and rigorous formalism of the approach with practical guidelines of conducting highly objective process of measuring the most important performance parameters. Two main components will be the building blocks of the proposed method: A portable, customizable model of a database implemented in a new open source technology based on the columnar RDBMS offered by Infobright, as well as Evaluation Matrix equipped with parameters and weights that can be customized for any client. The paper discusses a practical implementation in a business case that was delivered for one of the Agencies of the Canadian Government.