Alternative business intelligence engines

Business intelligence (BI) engines enable companies and researchers to perform fast and efficient data analysis and extract relevant information from their data. At the present, it involves the usage of reporting tools and OLAP on top of traditional relational database systems. This paper gives an overview of alternative BI systems, based on various NoSQL and NewSQL databases. NoSQL (Not-only SQL) systems were developed to address the scalability issues of traditional relational databases when exposed to huge amounts of data and large read and write capacities. In addition to fulfilling those requirements, NewSQL systems aimed to preserve the useful properties of relational databases as well, such as ACID transactions, SQL and a relational schema. The various systems bear significant differences in terms of architecture, data representation, query capabilities and optimization techniques, and because of that, they offer diverse means of data analysis. The paper comments on key differences, presents an overview of various NoSQL and NewSQL systems that might be considered in the context of BI engine, and brings an overall feature comparison of those systems.