I'm Confused.

You talk about BO and transaction processing in the same sentence as if you want to run those on the same box.

It's possible to do BO ( Data Warehouse ) and TP on the same box, but both kind of get compromised.

If you're serious TP (like me), then some things don't work well from the data warehouse world, like ROLLUPS and CUBES. At least you can't run them with your TP load. You have to run data warehouse stuff outside your prime TP processing window (eg. at night ). My take is that BO, Cognos, and MicroStrategy allow a business analyst to make data warehouse-like queries ( ROLLUPS and CUBES ) on a system.

So, if you're not careful, you're TP workload goes to hell in a handbasket as your business analyst is doing table scans to look at all the records for the summaries the VP wants, in the middle of the afternoon.

Maybe, if you have a big enough box, you don't care. But for our applications, the TP stuff has to add less than 1/2 second to our response time, and running data-warehouse queries puts us into 10-15 second response times very quickly.

Glen Austin