Data is the gold of today's businesses, but using and taking action on the data at the right time and right interface it the key.  Of course Data needs to be stored somewhere and that is the databasea so the accumulation of data in traditional databses and retrieving it in a fraction of a second is an obstacle to serving customers in today's speed of Now!

The most common database used in organizations is the relational database which comprises of rows and columns of data in tables that have a link with each other.  Challenge is as the amount of data increases it's taking more and more time to search and retrieve the needed information and present it to customers (internal and external) quickly.  This is the reason many new database technologies have been developed including no-SQL that provide a different way of storing and retrieving data.

And this is only on the software side.  There are contraints on the hardware as well as even the fastest servers still have physical limitations that get in the way so innovations on the hardware side are also needed such as solid state hard drives, and in-memory databases.

SAP's answer to this challenge is the in-memory database which stores the data at a much faster-to-reach place and saves time retrieving the data.