Towards Convergence in Information Systems Design

Abstract

Three technologies—business intelligence, big data, and machine learning—developed independently and address different types of problems. Data warehouses have been used as systems for business intelligence, and NoSQL databases are used for big data. In this chapter, the authors explore the convergence of business intelligence and big data. Traditionally, a data warehouse is implemented on a ROLAP or MOLAP platform. Whereas MOLAP suffers from having propriety architecture, ROLAP suffers from the inherent disadvantages of RDBMS. In order to mitigate the drawbacks of ROLAP, the authors propose implementing a data warehouse on a NoSQL database. They choose Cassandra as their database. For this they start by identifying a generic information model that captures the requirements of the system to-be. They propose mapping rules that map the components of the information model to the Cassandra data model. They finally show a small implementation using an example.