Prof. Dr. Alexander Zeier

• CTO-SBG & 1.Cloud Fellow of Accenture; Honorary Professor, Dr., MBA/Dipl-Kfm.
• Accenture

In this research article, the buzzwords of digital thread, digital twin, and Industry 4.0 are examined by means of a systematic literature review. The key concepts shaping these paradigms are investigated to achieve an overview of existing solutions. First, the body of the literature is explored to provide general observations on similarities and d...

The retailing industry witnessed a significant shift in the past years, which introduced significant modifications in the standard procedures and regular practices of supply chains (SC). These necessary modifications and worldwide distress caused major disruptions and instabilities in SC. Organizations started developing digital-transformation stra...

In this research article, the buzzwords of digital thread, digital twin, and Industry 4.0 are examined by means of a systematic literature review. The key concepts shaping these paradigms are investigated to achieve an overview of existing solutions. First, the body of the literature is explored to provide general observations on similarities and d...

A number of governments and organizations around the world agree that the first step to address national and international problems such as energy independence, global warming or emergency resilience, is the redesign of electricity networks, known as Smart Grids. Typically, power grids have broadcast power from generation plants to large population...

Nach 50 Jahren erfolgreicher Entwicklunghat die Business-IT einen neuenWendepunkt erreicht. Hier zeigen die Autoren erstmalig, wieIn-Memory Computing dieUnternehmensprozesse künftig verändern wird. Bisher wurden Unternehmensdaten aus Performance-Gründen auf verschiedene Datenbanken verteilt: Analytische Datenresidieren in Data Warehouses und werden...

In general, methods and apparatus, including computer program products, implementing and using techniques for providing a discovery service in a unique identifier network are described. Said discovery service is suitable for tracking and tracing a query item represented by a unique identifier in a unique identifier network. In particular, a search...

In general, methods and apparatus, including computer program products, implementing and using techniques for providing a discovery service in a unique identifier network are described. Said discovery service is suitable for tracking and tracing a query item represented by a unique identifier in a unique identifier network. In particular, a filter...

In general, methods and apparatus, including computer program products, implementing and using techniques for providing a discovery service in a unique identifier network are described. Said discovery service is suitable for tracking and tracing a query item represented by a unique identifier in a unique identifier network. In particular, a communi...

The invention relates to a computer-implemented method for operating a database comprising the step of updating a binary status of a tuple in the database. The binary status field either contains a null value or a time stamp. The update can be done in-place or by using an insert-only approach.

In this chapter, we offer our most important insights regarding operational and analytical systems from a business perspective. We describe how they can be unified to create a fast combined system. We also discuss how benchmarking can be changed to evaluate the unified system from both an operational and analytical processing perspective. As we saw...

This chapter describes why we believe the technology used in SanssouciDB is a good fit for Cloud Computing. We begin by defining Cloud Computing and then go on to describe the different types of applications that are suited for the cloud. Section 8.3 takes a provider’s point of view and describes the type of infrastructure required to offer cloud s...

Providing enterprise users with information they require, when they require it is not just a question of using the latest technology to store information in an efficient manner. Enterprise application developers and users need ways of accessing and storing their information that are suited to the tasks they wish to carry out. This includes things l...

This final chapter demonstrates that our vision of an in-memory database for large-scale enterprise applications is already in the process of becoming reality. The first product that implements many of the concepts of SanssouciDB is the new in-memory data management solution released by SAP at the end 2010. Companies can begin using in-memory appli...

This chapter provides an overview of how we realize our vision of providing real-time data about a business available in real time. We show how using an IMDB, designed specifically for enterprise applications, provides significant performance advantages. We describe the particular technologies we have used and why these are the best choices for our...

In this chapter we describe the detailed physical and logical foundations of SanssouciDB. Simply running an existing database on a machine with a lot of main memory and a large number of cores will not achieve the speed-up we are seeking. To achieve our goal of giving business users information at their fingertips, we need to create a database that...

Today, even small businesses operate in different geographical locations and service different industries. This can create a number of challenges including those related to language, currencies, different regulatory requirements, and diverse industry expectations. For large organizations with a wider reach, the challenges are even greater. As organ...

Sub-second respond time and real-time analytics are key requirements for applications that allow natural human computer interactions. We envision users of enterprise applications to interact with their software tools in such a natural way, just like any Internet user interacts with a web search engine today by refining search results on the fly whe...

A Computer system is a sophisticated combi-nation of software and hardware components that work closely together to solve today's problems. While algorithms within a software component itself can be implemented and optimized by a small group of developers, algorithms for an entire software stack are more complex and their development gets expensive...

The pharmaceutical industry suffers from steadily increasing counterfeit rates. RFID technology is named as a foundation for an integer and counterfeit-resistant pharmaceutical supply chain. A transformation toward an RFID-aided supply chain involves both technical and business adaptions. We share technical insights of our proposed architecture for...

The historically introduced separation of online analytical processing (OLAP) from online transaction processing (OLTP) is in question considering the current developments of databases. Column-oriented databases mainly used in the OLAP environment so far, with the addition of in-memory data storage are adapted to accommodate OLTP as well, thus pavi...

Fast execution of analytical and transactional queries in column-oriented in-memory DBMS is achieved by combining a read-optimized data store with a write-optimized differential store. To main-tain high read performance, both structures must be merged from time to time. In this paper we describe a new merge algorithm that applies full and partial m...

In the last fifty years the world has been completely transformed through the use of IT. We have now reached a new inflection point. This book presents, for the first time, how in-memory data management is changing the way businesses are run. Today, enterprise data is split into separate databases for performance reasons. Multi-core CPUs, large mai...

In-memory databases are developed to keep the entire data in main memory. Compared to traditional database sys- tems, read access is now much faster since no I/O access to a hard drive is required. In terms of write access, mechanisms are available which provide data persistence and thus secure transactions.

In-Memory-Datenbanken halten den gesamten Datenbestand permanent im Hauptspeicher vor. Somit können lesende Zugriffe weitaus schneller erfolgen als bei traditionellen Datenbanksystemen, da keine I/O-Zugriffe auf die Festplatte erfolgen müssen.

How do designers leverage information and communication technology to collaborate with team partners and other process participants? Given the increasingly complex, distributed, and virtual setups of design environments and processes, answering this question is challenging. At HPI, we have developed computational data collection and analysis techni...

Location-based event data is captured in RFID-aided supply chains for tacking individual goods. They are stored in distributed event repositories by involved supply chain parties. Performing anti-counterfeiting checks involves exchange of event data without exposure of sensitive business secrets. Current EPC global standards leave the definition of...

Read-optimized columnar databases use differential updates to handle writes by maintaining a separate write-optimized delta partition which is periodically merged with the read-optimized and compressed main partition. This merge process introduces significant overheads and unacceptable downtimes in update intensive systems, aspiring to combine tran...

Cloud computing’s usage-based pricing model creates an incentive for subscribers to optimize the utilization of the rented resources. The goal of the current work is to devise a formal approach for distributing workload among a minimum number of servers. The paper models this problem as a set partitioning problem and describes two solution approach...

Key-value stores which keep the data entirely in main memory can serve applications whose performance criteria cannot be met by disk-based key-value stores. This paper evaluates the performance implications of cache-conscious data placement in an in-memory key-value store by examining how many values have to be stored consecutively in blocks in ord...

Enterprise applications are traditionally divided in transactional and analytical processing. This separation was essential as growing data volume and more complex requests were no longer performing feasibly on conventional relational databases. While many research activities in recent years focussed on the optimization of such separation - particu...

Integrating RFID technology In current supply chains involves the development and testing of various IT systems, such as event repositories. Their development requires excessive real-world event data to verify architecture designs, access control, response time behavior, etc. Due to lack of industry-wide adoption of RFID technology, real-world even...

Prior applications of a system to monitor IT-mediated communication activities of design teams provided new insights into the collaboration behavior during the early phases of concept creation and prototyping. We now take our approach to the next level by sketching an architecture for a platform that aims to establish ‘out- of-the-box’ monitoring c...

The importance of reporting is ever increasing in today’s fast-paced market environments and the availability of up-to-date information for reporting has become indispensable. Current reporting systems are separated from the online transaction processing systems (OLTP) with periodic updates pushed in. A pre-defined and aggregated subset of the OLT...

Enabling fast and detailed insights over large portions of source code is an important task in a global development ecosystem. Numerous data structures have been developed to store source code and to support various structural queries, to help in navigation, evaluation and analysis. Many of these data structures work with tree-based or graph-based...

While analyzing a log file of a text-based source code search engine we discovered that developers search for fine-grained syntactical patterns in 36% of queries. Currently, to cope with queries of this kind developers need to use regular expressions, to add redundant terms to the query or to combine searching with other tools provided by the devel...

Source code search is an important tool used by software engineers. However, until now relatively little is known about what developers search for in source code and why. This paper addresses this knowledge gap. We present the results of a log file analysis of a source code search engine. The data from the log file was analyzed together with the ch...

In Software-as-a-Service, multiple tenants are typically consolidated into the same database instance to reduce costs. For analytics-as-a-service, in-memory column databases are especially suitable because they offer very short response times. This paper studies the automation of operational tasks in multi-tenant in-memory column database clusters....

Current database benchmarks are either focusing on online transaction processing (OLTP) or on online analytical pro- cessing (OLAP) systems. This traditional separation has to be reevaluated to reflect current trends in the design of database systems. We see a need for a realistic benchmark workload taking both aspects into account. Therefore, we d...

The early stages of engineering projects are considered the most critical phase of a product lifecycle and need to be better understood. The augmented virtualization and geographic dispersion of project environments create demand for an adaptive design research methodology, which takes the increasing role of distributed online interactions into acc...

Traditionally, enterprise data management is divided into separate systems. Online Transaction Processing (OLTP) systems are focused on the day to day business by being optimized for retrieving and modifying complete entities. Online Analytical Processing (OLAP) systems initiate queries on specific attributes as these applications are optimized to...

Assuming the feasibility of main-memory database management systems, the current research aims at designing a new type of data manipulation API, called Business Object Query Language (BOQL), specifically tailored for in-database data manipulation in main-memory ERP systems. The paper contributes the concept of business object virtualization and des...

A lot of tree-shaped data exists: XML documents, abstract syntax trees, hierarchies, etc. To accelerate query processing on trees stored in a relational database a pre-post-ordering can be used. It works well for locating ancestors of a single or few vertices because pre-post-ordering avoids recursive table access. However, it is slow if it comes t...

Agile software development processes are widely adopted in software engineering projects. Their low organizational overhead and iterative nature make them ideal choices for small development teams. The application of those methods in software projects that require collaboration between multiple sub-teams is a challenging task that remains subject t...

The use of RFID technology for anti-counterfeiting involves complex event processing, which exceeds the current state of the art of product tracking and tracing implementations. The use of RFID requires storing good related events for anti-counterfeiting in a distributed way by each handling party individually. We define a formal approach for model...

For traditional data warehouses, mostly large and expensive server and storage systems are used. For small- and medium size companies, it is often too expensive to implement and run such systems. Given this situation, the SaaS model comes in handy, since these companies might opt to run their OLAP as a service. The challenge is then for the analyti...

To meet the performance requirements of enterprise application for both, transactional application as well as analyt-ical scenarios, data storage of in-memory databases are split into two parts: One optimized for reading and a write-optimized differential buffer. The read-optimized main storage together with the differential buffer for inserts prov...

In RFID-aided supply chains captured location-based event data is stored in distributed repositories. Performing anti-counterfeiting involves checks on the good's path in the supply chain. The path is reconstructed by querying corresponding event data from distributed repositories. The object name service performs lookups of relevant event reposito...

The way teams use virtual collaboration tools, such as wikis, email systems, social networks, or version control systems can provide indicators for the success or failure of projects. We previously created a platform that allows to collect and analyze these virtual collaboration activities during project runtime in a non-interfering manner. In this...

— Prior applications of a system to monitor ITmediated communication activities of engineering teams provided new insights into the collaboration behavior during the early phases of engineering projects. Building on those findings, we now present an architecture for a platform that aims to establish ‘out-of-the-box ’ monitoring capabilities for vir...

The reunification of online transactional processing and online analytical processing in one single database has been proposed recently as the advent of columnar in-memory databases makes this both viable and feasible. Compared to traditional row-based databases, resource-intensive operations such as the aggregation can now be executed with high pe...

Supply chain visibility and real-time awareness are two of the major drivers for the implementation of Auto-ID technologies in Supply Chain Management. A prerequisite for achieving real-time awareness and company overlapping visibility is an infrastructure to enable companies to share supply chain information in a reliable and secure way. EPCglobal...

Anti-counterfeiting in RFID-aided supply chains builds on the retrieval and analysis of distributed EPC event data. Combining event data with third-party information can lead to exposure of business secrets or product resp. user profiles. We share details about our license-based access control prototype to protect the privacy of business parties. O...

In the last 50 years the world has been completely transformed through the use of IT. We have now reached a new inflection point. Here we present, for the first time, how in-memory data management is changing the way businesses are run. Today, enterprise data is split into separate databases for performance reasons. Analytical data resides in wareh...

Unternehmensanwendungen werden traditionell in OLTP (Online Transactional Processing) und OLAP (Online Analytical Processing) unterteilt. Während sich viele Forschungsaktivitäten der letzten Jahre auf die Optimierung dieser Trennung fokussieren, haben – im Speziellen während des letztes Jahrzehnts – sich sowohl Datenbanken als auch Hardware weitere...

A number of governments and organizations around the world agree that the first step to address national and international problems such as energy independence, global warming or emergency resilience, is the redesign of electricity networks, known as Smart Grids. Typically, power grids have "broadcasted" power from generation plants to large popula...

In this paper, we describe a main memory hybrid database system called HYRISE, which automatically partitions tables into vertical partitions of varying widths depending on how the columns of the table are accessed. For columns accessed as a part of analytical queries (e.g., via sequential scans), narrow partitions perform better, because, when sca...

In this paper, we describe a main memory hybrid database system called HYRISE, which automatically partitions tables into vertical partitions of varying widths depending on how the columns of the table are accessed. For columns accessed as a part of analytical queries (e.g., via sequential scans), narrow partitions perform better, because, when sca...

The pharmaceutical industry suffers increasingly from product counterfeits. Although RFID technology can be used as a basis for an integer and counterfeit-resistant pharmaceutical supply chain, the total costs of ownership are hardly specified. We define specific levels of security and corresponding fields of operation to value privacy of customers...

The emerging trend towards smart grids defines new requirements for designing enterprise applications for the energy market. Current solutions were built to process single billing runs as time-consuming batch jobs. Rather than processing some readings per year and household, a constant stream of meter readings has to be processed in context of a sm...

Enterprise applications are presently built on a 20-year old data management infrastructure that was designed to meet a specific set of requirements for OLTP systems. In the meantime, enterprise applications have become more sophisticated, data set sizes have increased, requirements on the freshness of input data have been strengthened, and the tim...

The diffusion of RFID technology continues using the Electronic Product Code (EPC) as unique identifier for physical objects. The EPC Network enables companies to share information about read events by defining EPC Information Services (EPCIS). The communication protocols in the EPC Network are defined to be XML and SOAP. We claim that a binary enc...

This work is devoted to the development of models and algorithms for purchase planning problem. For accurate and flexible purchasing it is important to be able to effectively combine input data from various types of sources. This paper proposes a method based on fuzzy sets to solve the problem of effective exploitation of expert knowledge and stati...

RFID implementations leverage competitive business advantages in processing, tracking and tracing of fast-moving goods. Most of them suffer from security threats and the resulting privacy risks as RFID technology was not designed for exchange of sensible data. Emerging global RFID-aided supply chains require open interfaces for data exchange of con...

BI accelerator solutions like the SAP NetWeaver database engine TREX achieve high performance when processing complex analytic queries in large data warehouses. They do so with a combination of column-oriented data organization, memory-based processing, and a scalable multiserver architecture. The use of data compression techniques further reduces...

With the increasing use of RFID technology the demand for resources for tag manufacturing rises. Nowadays, RFID tags for use with fast-moving goods are designed for a single pass through the entire supply chain. Once the product reaches the end-consumer the packaging material is recycled completely regardless whether it contains tags or not. This p...

Efficient data manipulation API is a necessary prerequisite in satisfying a number of acute needs of ERP system developers and eventually end-users. The current work defines the efficiency as an ability of accessing and manipulating ERP data at any granularity level, while maintaining integrity of the data. This paper contributes with the concept o...

Virtualization is mainly employed for increasing the utilization of a lightly-loaded system by consolidation, but also to ease the administration based on the possibility to rapidly provision or migrate virtual machines. These facilities are crucial for efficiently managing large data centers. At the same time, modern hardware --- such as Intel's N...

Database systems in the context of business data processing are segmented into two categories: those intended for online transaction processing (OLTP) and those for online analytical processing (OLAP). Over the last 15 years, database management system (DBMS) proposals directly addressing one of those categories were most represented in terms of ac...

Source code search goes far beyond simple textual search. One possibility of improving code search is the utilization of structural information in form of abstract syntax trees (ASTs). However, developers usually work with the textual representation of source code and, thus, have difficulties in expressing their queries as fragments of abstract syn...

Compression in column-oriented databases has been proven to offer both performance enhancements and reductions in storage consumption. This is especially true for read access as compressed data can directly be processed for query execution.Nevertheless, compression happens to be disadvantageous when it comes to write access due to unavoidable re-co...

Although the achievements of EPCglobal standardization efforts in the last years are substantial and the diffusion of the EPCglobal network continues, a service to access item-level information stored at potentially unknown supply chain partners is still missing. Without this 'Discovery Service' the EPCglobal network cannot be used with unknown bus...

For traditional data warehouses, mostly large and expensive server and storage systems are used. In particular, for small- and medium size companies, it is often too expensive to run or rent such systems. These companies might need analytical services only from time to time, for example at the end of a billing period. A solution to overcome these p...

The pharmaceutical industry suffers from increasing counterfeit rates. U.S. federal restrictions force manufacturers to guarantee product authenticity. RFID technology can be used as foundation for an integer and counterfeit-resistant pharmaceutical supply chain. We present an architecture optimized for storing and searching of pharmaceutical RFID...

Efficiency in data manipulation is of vital importance to ERP systems. A Flexible data manipulation application programming interface (API) helps to address a number of acute needs of application developers and eventually end users. Building on the notions of business objects and Web services, this paper contributes the design and implementation of...

Many relational databases exhibit complex dependencies between data attributes, caused either by the nature of the underlying data or by explicitly denormalized schemas. In data warehouse scenarios, calculated key figures may be materialized or hierarchy levels may be held within a single dimension table. Such column correlations and the resulting...

We agree that conducting rigorous evaluation of software artifacts is hard. This is especially true for RFID software components because of high throughput and large data volume. We see a lack in rigorous evaluation of RFID software components in research and industry. Guidelines are missing for how to generate test data, which metrics to apply, an...

Efficiency in data manipulation is of vital importance to ERP systems. A Flexible data manipulation application programming interface (API) helps to address a number of acute needs of application developers and eventually end users. Building on the notions of business objects and Web services, this paper contributes the design and implementation of...

Flexible data access is a necessary prerequisite to satisfy a number of acute needs of ERP system users and application developers. However, currently available ERP systems do not provide the ability to access and manipulate ERP data at any granularity level. This paper contributes with the concept of query-like service invocation implemented in th...

Along with benefits of ERP system companies experience high costs associated to them. Setting up and maintaining the infrastructure and adjusting standard ERP software to a specific customers requirements drive the costs of such systems. To lower the total cost of ownership companies employ software as a service (SaaS) paradigm: instead of owning s...

The use of RFID tags for storing unique identifiers increases the complexity of existing global supply chains. Companies participating in this RFID-aided supply chains are confronted with new challenges by using RFID technology. Most RFID tags contain no sophisticated data protection mechanisms, because they are primarily designed to be cheap and t...

Over the last couple of years a paradigm shift in CPU development has been happening: away from increasing the clock rate towards increasing the numbers of cores per CPU. In order to leverage the resulting new architectures, nowadays business applications have to be rewritten or at least adapted. This paper describes the most characteristic operati...

RFID technology has been adopted in the market. It is used in large enterprises for different approaches with great success. The rise of RFID technology is still at its beginning and there is a lot of unused potential, especially concerning the so called long tail. To achieve the full value of supply chain networks the SMEs have to introduce RFID t...

Binary search tree is a very common data structure in computer programming. Working with large BSTs can become complicated and inefficient unless a programmer can visualize them. This article contributes with two BST visualization algorithms that draw a tree in time linearly proportional to the number of nodes in a tree.

OLTP and OLAP systems are thought of as two different domains despite sharing the same base data set to operate on. The data set only differs in granularity and logical layout. Serious changes in the development of hardware and database systems have occurred since the separation of analytical systems from the transactional systems in the 1990's. As...

Global enterprises face an increasingly high complexity of software systems. Although size and complexity are two different aspects of a software system, traditionally, various size metrics have been established to indicate their complexity. In fact, many developed software metrics correlate with the number of lines of code. Moreover, a combination...

Todays applications have a specific demand for operational reporting. It becomes more important to gain information using analytic style queries on the current transactional data. In addition enterprises must keep track of historical data for legal reasons, so they are forced to track any changes in the system. One possibility to record all changes...

Enterprise applications are presently built on a 20 year old data management infrastructure that was designed to meet a specific set of requirements for OLTP systems. In the meantime, enterprise applications have become more sophisticated, data set sizes have increased, requirements on the freshness of input data have been strengthened, and the tim...

The acquisition of knowledge is an important factor for enterprises to stay in competition. In this context, especially the integration of structured and unstructured data is a vital task and has been subject to research for many years. Opposed to other integration strategies, we propose an architecture that relies on first-order logic as a semanti...

In the field of OLAP and data warehousing, column stores and compressed main-memory data storage technology have successfully been implemented in products that enable a significant speed improvement of analytical queries with special performance requirements. We could soon see the majority of analytical workloads move to such main-memory based syst...