How do top- and bottom-performing companies differ in using business analytics?

Purpose Business analytics (BA) has attracted growing attention mainly due to the phenomena of big data. While studies suggest that BA positively affects organizational performance, there is a lack of academic research. The purpose of this paper, therefore, is to examine the extent to which top- and bottom-performing companies differ regarding their use and organizational facilitation of BA. Design/methodology/approach Hypotheses are developed drawing on the information processing view and contingency theory, and tested using multivariate analysis of variance to analyze data collected from 117 UK manufacture companies. Findings Top- and bottom-performing companies differ significantly in their use of BA, data-driven environment, and level of fit between BA and data-drain environment. Practical implications Extensive use of BA and data-driven decisions will lead to superior firm performance. Companies wishing to use BA to improve decision making and performance need to develop relevant analytical strategy to guide BA activities and design its structure and business processes to embed BA activities. Originality/value This study provides useful management insights into the effective use of BA for improving organizational performance

Deductive Optimization of Relational Data Storage

Optimizing the physical data storage and retrieval of data are two key database management problems. In this paper, we propose a language that can express a wide range of physical database layouts, going well beyond the row- and column-based methods that are widely used in database management systems. We use deductive synthesis to turn a high-level relational representation of a database query into a highly optimized low-level implementation which operates on a specialized layout of the dataset. We build a compiler for this language and conduct experiments using a popular database benchmark, which shows that the performance of these specialized queries is competitive with a state-of-the-art in memory compiled database system