Cloud BI: Future of business intelligence in the Cloud

Hussain Al-Aqrabi, Lu Liu, Richard Hill, Nick Antonopoulos
2015 Journal of computer and system sciences (Print)  
Cloud computing is gradually gaining popularity among businesses due to its distinct advantages over self-hosted IT infrastructures. Business Intelligence (BI) is a highly resource intensive system requiring large-scale parallel processing and significant storage capacities to host data warehouses. In self-hosted environments it was feared that BI will eventually face a resource crunch situation because it will not be feasible for companies to keep adding resources to host a never ending
more » ... on of data warehouses and the online analytical processing (OLAP) demands on the underlying networking. Cloud computing has instigated a new hope for future prospects of BI. However, how will BI be implemented on Cloud and how will the traffic and demand profile look like? This research attempts to answer these key questions in regards to taking BI to the Cloud. The Cloud hosting of BI has been demonstrated with the help of a simulation on OPNET comprising a Cloud model with multiple OLAP application servers applying parallel query loads on an array of servers hosting relational databases. The simulation results reflected that true and extensible parallel processing of database servers on the Cloud can efficiently process OLAP application demands on Cloud computing. Hence, a BI designer needs to plan for a highly partitioned database running on massively parallel database servers in which each server hosts at least one partition of the underlying database serving the OLAP demands.
doi:10.1016/j.jcss.2014.06.013 fatcat:gashotik6bfjbkyam5jmc6bgra