SAP founder promises in-memory database revolution

"Speed is money," Hass Plattner, the co-founder of SAP told customers at the software giant's Sapphire customer and partner event in Orlando.

In a keynote address, Plattner urged delegates to prepare for "new world of in-memory computing" that would take advantage of multi-core processors and parallel computing to deliver business critical information in real time.

These technologies, together with new column-like ways of storing, compressing and accessing data, were fundamentally changing the speed in which decision makers could get the data they required.

Enterprise software companies could learn from the techniques used by gaming software developers on how to get the maximum output from multi core CPUs, said Plattner. Combining these techniques with columnar storage and by accessing only the most used fields in a database, it was possible to create effective in-memory databases.

Plattner demonstrated the power and speed of in-memory databases to the Sapphire audience. He went on to pledge that by using in-memory databases, any business query in a company the size of SAP could be returned and presented in an industry standard format, such as Microsoft Excel in less than a second.

While not promising that SAP would develop the concept as a product, Plattner left no doubt that he thought this was the way ahead.