A stupid question about in-memory analytics

During my first trip to Oracle OpenWorld as an analyst a few years ago I asked a room full of Oracle data-warehousing users whether any of them had explored the use-cases for other Oracle data management assets, such as the TimesTen in-memory database.

The question was met with complete silence before Ken Jacobs kindly suggested that perhaps this wasn’t the right crowd for that sort of question.

It was one of those moments that really haunts you. My first industry event as an analyst and I had embarrassed myself by asking an apparently stupid question in front of a room of more experienced colleagues and potential clients.

Doesn’t seem like such a stupid question now though, does it?

I have exorcised the demons! This house is clear.

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1 comment so far ↓

#1 markus on 03.03.12 at 9:35 am

hi matthew
i had similiar situations in 2009 with sap customers and colleagues. and i remember Larry allison telling stories about hasso plattner must be on drugs because of his in memory computing vision.
the situation has changed since 2009, more and more sap clients are playing around with SAP Hana, and a few are already in production, mainly with the real time operational BI case ( called ECC side by side model at SAP).

would be interesting to figure out how exalytics/exadata compares to SAP HANA, especially since SAP BW runs on HANA (nov 2011).

what is your opinion?

best
markus