From one enterprise to another, business intelligence systems are rapidly becoming mission-critical, looking more and more like operational system.  As service levels for business intelligence applications tighten, ad hoc and analytic query workload gets lowered in priority.

As a result in many organizations, analytics users find themselves underserved by prevailing data warehousing and business intelligence infrastructure.  Queries that should take minutes take hours, the ones that took hours now take days, and many others go unaddressed.