HyDash: A Dashboard for Real-Time Business Intelligence based on the HyPer Main Memory Database System

Business Intelligence (BI) is a set of techniques that help improve business decision making. From a technical point of view, BI relies on a set of tools which includes performance dashboards: layered services that combine monitoring, analysis, and reporting. However, most dashboard solutions today are based on data warehouses which face a problem of data staleness—a circumstance caused by the separation of transactional and analytical processing. Novel hybrid main memory database systems such as SAP’s HANA or HyPer overcome this issue and achieve best-of-breed transaction processing throughput and analytical query response times in one system in parallel on the same database state. In this work, we contribute HyDash, a web-based dashboard for real-time business intelligence. HyDash visualizes key performance indicators (KPIs) based on predefined SQL queries and provides an ad-hoc SQL query interface to dynamically extend the scope of the dashboard. HyDash relies on (i) hybrid main memory database systems and (ii) a push-based query result update mechanism based on the novel HTML5 WebSockets.