Question

I’ve just been watching the QCON presentation about Disruptor. It looks like (and it may well be I’ve not fully grasped it – so SIA) this is good for OLTP, but I am not sure whether it is also useful for OLAP-type applications. It fundamentally seems to be around access to/response from (and in fact re-architecting) your business logic for optimal OLTP performance.

So, would there any benefit for an OLAP application (other than the efficient management of requests/responses) and is so what are the kind of things you’d need to consider and where could it be applied ? Or perhaps it is just wrong to try an apply it in this area?

Thx

S

Answer 1

You could potentially use a Disruptor-style approach to allow realtime incremental updates to OLAP cubes based on incoming event streams.

I’m not sure it would really buy you much though for the following reasons.

• Typically OLAP applications don’t need this kind of ultra low latency in themselves. Hourly updates are probably enough for most businesses using OLAP for operational analytics. I’ve never seen an OLAP application in which sub-millisecond updates would add any value.
• If you really needed low latency response for some other purpose then you probably wouldn’t want to pipe the data through an OLAP cube first