HP has updated its data warehousing appliance, Neoview, increasing its ability to deliver real-time business intelligence.

The new version of Neoview includes several enhancements that improve its ability to handle mixed workloads of substantial queries and multitudes of shorter transaction-like queries.

The updated Neoview includes HP's Adaptive Segmentation technology, which can allocate computational resources according to the type of query.

HP has also added a Skewbuster feature, which improves system performance by acting as a traffic co-ordinator.

Finally, HP has improved Neoview's ability to deal with data in real time with the addition of its Transporter technology, which allows data to be analysed without having to be loaded in to the data warehouse.

But analysts remain sceptical about the prospects for real-time business intelligence (BI).

While the data warehousing market is evolving, advances have primarily come from the development of software-as-a-service, and "more generic appliances built on commodity technology appearing", said Datamonitor senior analyst Vuk Trifkovic.

“The main problem so-called real-time BI is that people often talk about it, rather than pointing to concrete examples of the technology.

“It's not something you can buy in a box – it's going to be something that's more of an evolution, building on the existing decision-making systems currently deployed,” added Trifkovic.

Organisations looking for real-time BI are more likely to look at embedding low-level analytics in transactional applications, while looking to leverage business process management systems to "inject BI into everyday operational business processes", he added.