BI Accelerator from a different perspective

While I can't agree with all points in Rita's posting on BI-A, she does make a few good points regarding licensing costs and openness; I would have liked to hear about the options SAP BW installations (prior to 3.5) have when it comes to creating predicable, fast query response times. 

There are alternative aggregation engines that support heterogeneous environments. HyperRoll's relational solution comes first to mind when thinking of BI-A and using aggregation to optimize performance.

Another possibility would be to investigate a tool like Celequest's Lava for SAP which uses its ability to capture real-time data streams and aggregate them on the fly. The total wall-time performance is pretty impressive. Another thing I didn't hear Rita mention is the time it takes to extract from R/3 and then load BW create aggregates apply business alerting rules etc etc. I've seen 16 hour loads that have had the European subsidiaries pulling their hair out during month end processing. While real-time analytics (I suppose the word de jour is Operational BI) is not needed for every business event Celequest may be onto something with their approach to capturing real-time business events.

Don't get me wrong BI-A does boast some impressive query response times and solving for that will help to enable broader deployments, but 16 hour processing windows need to be addressed.