Leveraging in-memory technology for interactive analyses of point-of-sales data

Retailers face not only the challenge of consolidating all the data generated by electronic point-of-sale (POS) terminals, but also to leverage the data to derive business value. Especially when the data is stored at its finest granularity recording the actual transactions with all their items, processing becomes a challenge. In this work, we describe how in-memory technology can help to analyze POS data and how it enables new types of enterprise applications. We show that it is possible to interactively explore the transactional data set without precomputing analytical summaries while providing users with full flexibility. As an example, we present a prototypical application for interactive analyses and exploration of 8 billion records of real data from a large retail company with sub-second response times.