Real Time Business Intelligence involves delivering information to users as it happens.
Real time intelligence may be particularly important in industries where events are changing all the time – for example, financial markets. Retail industries may also require real time intelligence to monitor sales.
However, real time intelligence is as real time as the underlying data that feeds it. If your reports are running over a data warehouse which is refreshed every evening or perhaps every six hours, your intelligence will reflect that data set.
In order to get real time intelligence, or as close as real time as possible, reports need to be scoped directly over a transactional database, bearing in mind that this may have an impact on the transactional database itself, or it may be even driven. An event in the transactional database may fire an event which can update a report in real time. This event can force an immediate update to a database or may be processed in memory.
What must be borne in mind when considering real time systems, is that the closer to ‘real time’ the information is, the more expensive it is going to cost in terms of hardware and software to deliver that information. There must therefore be a trade off, so that the costs of delivering that information do not outweigh the cost benefits of receiving that information quickly.