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There’s been a lot of attention lately given to the emerging space of Big Data technology. Like you, PROS has been researching the latest technologies to include in our products. Our goal is to deliver prescriptive insights so you’re able to stay ahead of your competitors.

In PROS newest product release, PPSS 3.21, we upgraded our analytics stack to include support for Microsoft SQL Server 2012, which includes a new in-memory storage option called x-Velocity. This option offers customers the ability to store large amounts of OLAP-style data in a column-based memory cache to greatly improve performance of user queries. The column store is a clever approach to compressing data, since typically data in a column is similar in format.

What does this mean to you?  If you utilize this x-Velocity option, with the DAX querying language, you could see query performance improvements as high as 10x to 100X. That’s right. 10x to 100x. In our testing at PROS, we saw examples of queries returning in 1/100th of the time compared with SQL 2008 R2 cubes.

In-memory is just one component of a Big Data strategy. The ability to reduce server workloads allows us to get even more performance from the same hardware, with bigger data sets and larger numbers of concurrent users.

Microsoft isn’t the only company using column-storage to improve performance. In fact, SAP has made major investments as part of its HANA technology. We’ll be talking about that in future posts as we continue our research.

How are your efforts going with Big Data?  What challenges are you running into?

John Salch

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John Salch

John Salch is vice president of technology and platforms at PROS. He leads the company’s technology organization, as well as teams responsible for its technology partnerships, including Microsoft, SAP, Salesforce.com and IBM. Salch also holds responsibilities for PROS mid-market product line. During his 15-year tenure with PROS, he has worked on the company’s science team, developing forecasting algorithms. Salch has also served in several product development positions, where he developed big data solutions across a wide variety of PROS products and industries. Salch is a proponent of using agile/lean development approaches. He participates in several organizations in the technology community. Salch earned a Ph.D. in statistics from Rice University.

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