Tuesday, June 14, 2011

CAP Equivalent for Analytics?

Incidently, I've bumped into Camuel Gilyadov's blog titled CAP Equivalent for Analytics. In analogy to the CAP theorem, he argues, there is a similar trade-off between the following four dimensions in an analytic processing environment, i.e. not all four of them together can be achieved; at least one of them needs to be compromised:
  • sophistication: in simple terms, this refers to the complexity of SQL statements needed for the analysis, e.g. complex joins, multiple sorts etc.
  • volume: this refers to data volume involved in the analysis.
  • latency: here, he means the combination of time to load and transform data (ideally: 0) + query processing time (ideally: sub-second).
  • costs: actually, it's meant to be the costs for hard- and software but I'd add that those costs are a symptom of hard- and/or software architecture complexity.

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