BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE

Experience the power of infinite scalability

Birst’s modern web-scale architecture delivers enterprise-grade performance

Delivering analytical capabilities across the enterprise inevitably requires supporting

large data volumes and high levels of concurrency. This is why Birst® has been

designed to deliver world-class performance on top of a modern, multi-tenant cloud

architecture that can scale infinitely across a shared-nothing, multi-node environment.

Unlike traditional client-server-based solutions, there is no single bottleneck to

hinder performance.

Real-world usage, unmatched performance

During peak production-usage periods, Birst’s cloud environment regularly supports

more than 267,000 queries per hour with 77,000 active users concurrently. In-house

performance lab tests show a total query throughput of over 22,000 queries per hour

per node from more than 4,000 active users (20,000 total users) per node with an

average response time under 2 seconds. Birst’s multi-tenant architecture has been

demonstrated to scale linearly and can process larger data volumes than traditional

legacy BI platforms. For example, a four-node configuration will support 4X the

workload and users.

2Data Sheet: Experience the power of infinite scalability

A modern web-scale architectureBirst is a fully multi-tenant solution that leverages an

infinitely scalable pool of computing resources built on a

shared-nothing architecture. This stands in stark contrast

to traditional client-server-based platforms that load data

in-memory into a single-server instance that results in

performance bottlenecks and scalability constraints.

The chart below clearly shows Birst’s linear scalability.

Listed here are details about the tests:

■ A series of single and multi-threaded queries were

executed against a 4 billion row fact table and multiple

dimension tables, the largest containing 0.5 billion records.

■ The average response time per query was 1.6 seconds

with no degradation up to 10 parallel threads per node.

■ On average, each query was comprised of multiple

attributes and metrics, or approximately 30 columns.

■ The tests assume each active user submits an average

of 18.5 queries per hour.

■ The tests assume active users represent 20% of the

total population.

■ Testing was performed against a multi-node Amazon®

Web Services (AWS) environment.

■ A single node has 16 virtual CPUs (Intel Xeon® 2.4 GHz)

and 64 GB of RAM.

Birst performance and scalability in numbers

■ 3.5 petabytes of data stored*

■ 6,400,000 queries per day or 266,702 per

hour (average)

■ 10,500,000 dashboards

■ 149,000 dashboard views per day

■ 65,000 data sources

■ 190,000 uploads per day

■ 81,000 interactive logins per day

■ 355,000 webservices logins per day

■ 1 multi-tenant architecture

• Client-server clustering• Single-server dependency• Proprietary in-memory structures• Single point of contention (bottleneck)

Legacy BI

• Modern web-scale architecture• Multi-tenant environment• Stateless application servers• Horizontal scalability

Server 1 Server 2 Server 3 Server n

Server 1

*Only includes data stored in the Birst cloud. Birst customers also analyze massive data volumes stored in private clouds and on-premises.

3Data Sheet: Experience the power of infinite scalability

■ “Always On” upgrades and data loads: Thanks to Birst’s

multi-tenant architecture, users experience no service

disruption during system upgrades or data loads. Birst

leverages modern load balancers that take individual

servers out of the pool and are incrementally upgraded.

■ In-database blending: Blended results can be retrieved

from any node in the system, eliminating bottlenecks

because users are not tied to an individual server.

■ Columnar and in-memory storage: Birst offers support for

column-store databases such as Microsoft’s SQL Server

and Amazon Redshift and in-memory databases like Exasol

and SAP HANA for faster and more efficient queries.

■ MPP: Birst offers a high-performance analytic database

option, designed from the ground up for speed. This

features massively parallel processing to coordinate

processing simultaneously across separate nodes.

■ Distributed and asynchronous services: By ensuring

that data loading and extraction loads are separated

from front-end data visualization processes, Birst delivers

reliable, consistent and high-performance services for

all workloads.

Performance and scalability optimizations

■ Push-down analytics: Birst pushes calculations down to

the database platform to leverage its capabilities, while

Birst’s semantic layer translates operations into database-

specific functions.

■ Query optimization: Birst generates and optimizes

queries—both for data loading and for analysis—

appropriate to the backend data source.

■ Intelligent multi-tiered caching: Birst provides both in-

memory and on-disk caching, using exact and fuzzy cache

matching algorithms.

■ Globally shared caching: Every query from every user

interacts with a common, shared and horizontally scalable

caching infrastructure that ensures the best performance

in the industry.

■ Smart aggregates: Birst can generate and leverage “smart

aggregates” to accelerate queries in a more flexible and

more scalable way than in-memory cubes.

Birst linear scalability testQueries/hour and active users with response times < 2 seconds

# of nodes # Queries/Hr # Active users

1

50,000

100,000

150,000

200,000

250,000

2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 11

22,072 44,145 66,217 88,289 110,362 132,434 154,506 176,579 198,651 220,723

4,083 8,167 12,250 16,334 20,417 24,500 28,584 32,667 36,750 40,834

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It’s not just about performanceAlthough performance and scalability are important for the

overall user experience, it’s also important to remember that

Birst has many unique features that set it apart from most

other business intelligence and analytics platforms.

The cloud BI and analytics platform from Birst, an Infor®

company, helps organizations understand and optimize

complex processes in less time than traditional BI solutions.

Built with patented automation and machine learning

technologies, Birst’s “networked BI” approach connects

teams and applications across the enterprise via a trusted

network of analytics and insights to inform smarter decisions.

This unique approach helps leading companies improve

profitability, reduce costs, increase revenues, and transform

the way they do business—often in 90 days or less.

Learn more ›