Leaders across every organization learned valuable lessons about leading their teams more thoughtfully during the pandemic. Here at Actian, we learned that being a flexible, adaptable, and empathetic leader goes a long way in building trust with our teams. The pandemic and resulting seismic shift in how we interact with our colleagues shed light…
Every day, 2.5 quintillion bytes of new data are created worldwide – giving businesses access to new sources of information that they can use to create better experiences for their customers and confirm for many that big business knows pretty much everything about you. Last week, I was in Boston for sales training and…
Why Performance Matters My very first sales call to an analytics prospect was with a customer using an OLTP database for reporting. Some of their reports took hours to run and one particularly challenging report typically ran for more than thirteen hours. Our performance benchmarking had shown that for analytics workloads, Actian would be…
This month, GigaOm published a comprehensive evaluation of leading cloud data warehouse services based on performance and cost. Offerings analyzed included Snowflake, Amazon Redshift, Microsoft Azure Synapse, Google BigQuery, and our very own Actian Avalanche. There are many intriguing results included in the report, but an indisputable conclusion was reached by GigaOm: "In a…
Today we are excited to announce the release of Actian Avalanche on Microsoft Azure. Azure is growing significantly as a platform in the enterprise space and becoming the de facto choice for retail analytics. Hence, making Actian Avalanche available on Microsoft Azure has been a priority for us. With this release, Actian Avalanche is…
This is the fourth and final installment of an in-depth blog series examining the findings of the recent Actian Datacast 2019: Hybrid Data Trends Snapshot. The survey (which polled 303 IT professionals with influence or decision-making ability at companies of 250+ employees) identified four key trends which were illustrated in the Datacast Infographic. Our…
Looking around at Strata this morning I observe that the folks here fall into three broad categories: The t-shirt wearing techie who proudly wears their favorite logo'ed t-shirt e.g. "Data is the New Bacon" and who is here to reassure themselves that there isn't much that they don't know about what is happening in…
We are pleased to announce the availability of Actian Vector 5.1. This release includes enhancements across the product, but the primary focus is with security, performance, and new customer enablement. This post provides an overview of some features added to this release. Security With the advent of GDPR we’ve seen heightened focus on security.…
Doug Inkster is an Actian Fellow with a long history in the database market, starting with IDMS in the 1970’s and moving to Ingres in the 1990’s. We asked him to reminisce about the most exciting times in his long career. Here are some of his thoughts: In my 40+ years of working with…
When a major UK logistics company wanted to improve reporting for its large accounts, they turned to Actian to design, implement and support the underlying database system (“LARS”) using Ingres, HVR and Vector products for its architecture. The Brief The customer had around 100 Customer Accounts Representatives dedicated to large accounts, with each Rep…
Today we announce the introduction of the next release of Actian Vector in Hadoop, extending our support of Apache Spark to include direct access to native Hadoop file formats and tighter integration with Spark SQL and Spark R applications. In this release, we also incorporate performance improvements, integration with Hadoop security frameworks, and administrative…
