Evaluating HTAP Databases for Machine Learning Applications

HTAP is a term coined by The Gartner Group to describe a class of database systems that are Hybrid Transactional and Analytical Processing Systems. The power of HTAP is to serve a new class of applications that are intelligent – applications that analyze real-time data to provide the most timely insights possible. Previous generations of databases could not service such applications because the data had to move from operational systems to analytical systems via an ETL (Extraction, Transformation, and Load) process that typically takes many hours. It could even take s days before an analytical system would be able to process the data. This inherent lag caused by ETL required companies, governments, and academic researchers to look through the rear-view mirror of their operation instead of looking forward through the windshield.