It's the Dawning of the Age of BI DBMS

Authored by Boris Evelson, Forrester Research

According to this just released report from Forrester, mainstream relational databases, originally designed for transaction processing and not analysis, are an awkward fit for BI. They require lots of tuning and customization and constant optimization — which is difficult, time-consuming, and costly.

The study goes on to recommend using an inverted index for complex data structures and unstructured content, stating the inverted index BI DBMS approach questions the assumption that you must start with a database and then worry about tuning it by building indexes on top of it. This approach builds one big index, but instead of just pointing to data sources - as traditional search engines like Google or Yahoo do — it embeds data in the index itself.

Forrester also recommends considering inverted index DBMS when you:

• Build too many data marts or cubes
• Really need data-driven, not schema-driven, BI
• Don't know what you don't know