December 9, 2021 Does FHIR Fully Address Healthcare Data Interoperability Silo Challenges? Let's face it, information withholding is common in many industries, but it’s been especially rampant in the healthcare space. Payers and Providers have avoided scrutiny for the cost of care delivered and the reimbursements they were collecting. Consequently, information blocking has become one of the key impediments in shifting from a fee-for-service (FFS) model… Read More
November 10, 2021 Using a Healthcare Data Analytics Hub to Derive More Efficient and Effective Insights for Value-Based Care Last August I wrote a blog about the data at the Beating Heart of Healthcare and introduced the concept of the healthcare data analytics hub. Frequent readers will remember that a healthcare data analytics hub provides a unified, cloud-based platform that supports access, enrichment, analysis, visualization, and reporting services to both automate and act… Read More
August 4, 2021 Data: the Beating Heart of Healthcare Payers, health plans, and integrated health systems run on data. Integration, processing, and analytics are integral to their business process and managing of costs and risk. The role of payers in the healthcare industry has been expanding for years. As care models have shifted from fee-for-service to coordinated and value-based care, payers and providers… Read More
July 17, 2021 It’s Time for Data Historians to Become … History Database Historians...History? Why a modern time-series capable database can simplify yet enhance time-series data analysis. Despite the professorial image the term suggests, a data historian is not an instructor or researcher, but a purpose-build software solution. And evolutions in how operational data is used and managed have eclipsed the need for data historian software… Read More
March 25, 2021 What is the Difference Between a Data Analytics Hub and a Lakehouse? In the opening installment of this blog series—Data Lakes, Data Warehouses and Data Hubs: Do we need another choice? I explore why simply migrating these on-prem data integration, management, and analytics platforms to the Cloud does not fully address modern data analytics needs. In comparing these three platforms, it becomes clear that all of… Read More
February 25, 2021 What is a Data Analytics Hub? And why is it better than a Data Lake or an Analytics Hub? In the opening installment of this blog series—Data Lakes, Data Warehouses and Data Hubs: Do we need another choice? I explore why simply migrating these on-prem data integration, management, and analytics platforms to the Cloud does not fully address modern data… Read More
February 17, 2021 Data Lakes, Data Warehouses and Data Hubs – Do we need another choice? Data Lakes, Data Warehouses, and Data Hubs - Do we need another choice? There’s a long-standing debate, dating back to the early days of Hadoop, about what kind of data repository is best for a given data analytics use case. A Data Lake? A Data Hub? A Data Warehouse? Despite Hadoop’s fall from grace,… Read More
January 11, 2021 Delivering real-time Customer 360 insights faster and easier in challenging times A long time ago (read: before the COVID-19 pandemic started), companies around the world were interested in developing a full 360-degree view of their customers. The importance of creating a tailored, data-enhanced customer experience was understood, but formidable challenges—the fact that the data comprising an individual customer profile resides in so many disparate systems,… Read More
November 12, 2020 Our 2020 Cloud Data Migration Survey Results are in Why is this study different? OK, so that’s like saying the sky is blue on a clear sunny day, right? Actually, it’s cloudier than that – pun intended! If you talk to Cloud vendors, everything is moving to the cloud and has been for over a decade, so the glass is half full. If… Read More
September 25, 2020 A Two-Part Approach to Track & Trace in Urban and Suburban Settings As businesses work to reopen and students return, in-person, to schools nationwide, track and trace is a critical component to mitigate potential resurgences in COVID-19 cases. The more densely populated a city, the harder track and trace will be. However, getting urban and suburban areas moving again is critical to jumpstarting the US economy.… Read More
July 2, 2020 SQLite: Not Faster, Not Better, But Cheaper? Understanding SQLite’s Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) Over the past three months this blog series has explored why developers gravitated toward SQLite for embedded data management. Some developers chose SQLite because members of the extended team knew SQL and wanted to leverage that knowledge to support data management or the extraction of data for… Read More
June 17, 2020 SQLite’s Serverless Architecture Doesn’t Serve IoT Environments Well Part Three: SQLite, the “Flat File” of Databases Over the past few articles, our SQLite Blog series has been looking at SQLite Serverless Architecture and how it is unsuitable for IoT Environments. Those of you who have been following can jump ahead to the next section, but if you’re new to this discussion, you… Read More
June 11, 2020 SQLite’s Serverless Architecture Doesn’t Serve IoT Environments Well Part Two Part Two: Rethinking What Client-Server Means for Edge Data Management Over the past few weeks our SQLite Blog series has considered the performance deficiencies of SQLite when handling local persistent data and looked at the performance complications created by the need for ETL when sharing SQLite data with back-end databases. In our last installment—Mobile… Read More
June 11, 2020 SQLite’s Serverless Architecture Doesn’t Serve IoT Environments Well Part One Part One: Mobile may be IoT—but, when it comes to data, IoT is not Mobile Three weeks ago, we looked at the raw performance—or the lack thereof—of SQLite. After that, we looked at SQLite within the broader context of Modern Edge Data Management and discovered that its performance shortcomings were in fact compounded by… Read More
May 26, 2020 Real-Time Decision-Making Use Cases in the Retail Industry – Part 3 In the first part of my blog on Real-Time Decision-Making (RTDM) highlighting Retail industry use cases, we discussed how combining existing historical data patterns with disparate new sources of data completes the Common Operational Picture (COP). To illustrate the use-case, we used an Actian customer, Kiabi, and how they used RTDM strategic capabilities to… Read More
May 18, 2020 Real-Time Decision-Making Use Cases in the Retail Industry – Part 2 In my last blog on Real-Time Decision-Making (RTDM), I shifted from a theoretical discussion of what RTDM is to uses cases that highlight key aspects of the value it can bring to business in periods of market uncertainty. I'm using the Retail Industry because its an Industry everyone knows something about coupled with the… Read More
May 14, 2020 Real-Time Decision-Making Use Cases in the Retail Industry In the last blog on Real-Time Decision-Making (RTDM), we discussed exactly what it is and why it matters. Before proceeding with more theoretical discussions, though, it’s probably worthwhile to give you some practical examples of RTDM and how data management, integration, and analytics support, build RTDM strategic capabilities that significantly impact business operations. Retail:… Read More
April 29, 2020 SQLite – the Banana Slug of Embedded Databases Earlier this month, I kicked off a series of blogs about SQLite. The first looked at the advantages that SQLite offers over both flat files and the heavier lift of an enterprise-grade SQL databases – and it does offer distinct advantages over both. To a point. And that point was five years ago. Here's… Read More
April 29, 2020 Why do you need Real-Time Decision-Making in Times of Market Uncertainty, and what is it Anyway? I recently started a new blog series on why Real-Time Decision-Making is required during periods of market uncertainty. In this next blog, lets level set on exactly what is Real-Time Decision-Making and why it matters so much more during periods of market uncertainty and business disruption. Naturally, what got me thinking about all of… Read More
April 22, 2020 Real-Time Decision-Making in Times of Market Uncertainty Can’t be Business-As-Usual Saying that the current business climate and market conditions are tough is about as much an understatement as saying a Banana Slug is not terribly fast. Making the right decisions too slowly or wrong decisions too quickly can have equally adverse outcomes. In certain industries such as Retail, Travel, and Hospitality or for smaller… Read More
April 7, 2020 Making the Transition from Flat Files to SQLite – pluses, but what’s missing against requirements? In December, January, and February, I posted a short series of blogs on Flat file systems. The series of blogs focus on the continued use of flat files and why they are no longer viable for use in the future. The first installment focused on flat files and why embedded software application developers readily adopted… Read More
November 25, 2019 It’s Back to the Future for Flat Files … Part Three Why embedded software application developers should dump flat files before they have to run dump on them I wrote an initial blog a few weeks ago on flat files and why embedded software application developers readily adopted them. Then in the next blog, I covered why embedded developers are reluctant to use databases. In… Read More
November 11, 2019 It’s Back to the Future for Flat Files … Part Two Why Embedded Software Application Developers Loath Databases Last week I wrote an initial blog on flat files and why embedded software application developers readily adopted them. Simply put, they’re always there – if you’ve got an Operating System that’s more than a bare-bones executive kernel it’s there and it’s free. Also, flat files are… Read More
November 6, 2019 It’s Back to the Future for Flat Files … Part One Why embedded software application developers adopted flat files Recently, my colleague here in Actian Product Marketing, Pradeep Bhanot, wrote a great blog on Data Historians in which he called for their retirement in favor of more modern databases to support time-series data processing and analytics. But, in some ways, historians are not as historic… Read More
August 22, 2019 If ETL Is Integration Hell, How Do I Avoid It and Go to Heaven? Extract, Transform, and Load (ETL) is the process that has been used to share data between applications, transactional systems, and data warehouses for decades. It essentially works like this; you define an integration, pull the data out of the source system, use some mapping and aggregation rules to transform the data into the format… Read More
July 31, 2019 Should You Have Separate Document, Time-Series, NoSQL and SQL Databases or Can a Single Database Support All of These Data Types and Requirements? Managing and analyzing heterogeneous data is a challenge for most companies, which the oncoming wave of Edge Computing-generated datasets has only exacerbated. This challenge stems from a rather large “data-type mismatch” as well as how and where data has been incorporated into applications and business process. How did we arrive here? At one time,… Read More
July 11, 2019 Will Data Management in Operational Technology Finally Be Standardized? The proliferation of Operational Technology (OT) within companies is increasing, which has led many to ask whether this will lead to standardization of how operational technology generated data is managed? The answer is “it’s complicated.” There is unlikely to be standardization of the data individual operational technology devices generate, but there will be new… Read More
June 13, 2019 Delivering the Right Data to the Right User in the Right Format is the Key to Success for Data Architects, Engineers, and DBAs The data consumers within your organization aren’t a homogeneous group, so you must adapt your data management solutions accordingly. At one end of the spectrum is the ideal, “one-size-fits-all” solution. At the other end is a customized set of capabilities for each individual user that seems ideal, but is unworkable. How then do you… Read More
June 11, 2019 Democratization of Data Means Making Data Usable for Users of Varied Skill Levels and Charters If you’re a data engineer or a data architect, then you’re probably kept awake at night wondering how to design your data integration, management and analytics support platforms, so your DBAs and IT Ops colleagues can easily manage them while a varied set of data users are able to consume them simultaneously. These users… Read More
May 21, 2019 Is Your Data Making a Difference? For many years, companies have been accumulating large amounts of data with an intuitive feeling that it has value and would be put to good use to make more informed business decisions. As we transition into a new era where machine learning and artificial intelligence are enabling more robust analysis of a company’s data… Read More
February 21, 2019 Retail Kiosk Fail. How IoT instrumentation could have averted my purchase being MIA at MIA. Last week, I was returning from our Actian 2019 Sales Kickoff. I’d already spent considerable time trying to get a USB-C 65-Watt charger for my Lenovo laptop from Amazon to my hotel, which ultimately failed so I was faced with a very long unproductive day with a dead laptop battery. I was wondering by… Read More
December 19, 2018 Worried about SQLite security vulnerabilities? Keep calm and stay safe. Face the inevitable: Local persistent data at the Edge will happen It’s indisputable that Edge Intelligence will grow, whether that’s mobile applications running on Smartphones, IoT applications running in Smart Cars (or the underlying sensors), in the entertainment center, navigation systems, etc. There will be countless mobile and IoT – taken as a whole,… Read More
October 19, 2018 Our new Lifeboat partnership extends our reach with Cloud, Mobile and IoT Developers This week Lifeboat announced their new contract to distribute our Actian product lines through their vast reseller channels as well as direct to their customers (you can find details here). Speaking as the Actian Product Management and Marketing lead for one of those product lines, the Actian Zen Edge database family, this is a… Read More
October 18, 2018 Airplane Mode aka The Cloud Digital Divide I recently took a last-minute trip from San Francisco to India. The best fare in economy I could find was on a sixteen-hour Air India flight, direct to New Delhi. I figured I’d get a lot of work done on the flight and, if not, at least I could catch-up on movie watching. Turns… Read More
March 7, 2022 Hybrid Cloud Security One of the biggest fears of cloud adoption is the security of organizational data and information. IT security has always been an issue for all organizations, but the thought of not having total control over corporate data is frightening. One of the factors for organizations not moving everything to the cloud and adopting a… Read More
January 31, 2022 What’s an Edge Data Fabric? What’s a Data Fabric? A data fabric is a data architecture, management practices, and policies to deliver a set of data services that span all these domains and endpoints. Data fabrics provide that framework. They essentially serve as both the translator and the plumbing for data in all its forms, wherever it sits and… Read More
November 1, 2021 Healthcare Data Warehouse A data warehouse is a centralized repository for the storage of data from one or more aggregated sources, updated immediately with real-time data yet retaining prior data for a more comprehensive dataset. The data in the data warehouse can be different types of data in various formats for disparate sources such as electronic health… Read More
October 25, 2021 What is an Enterprise Data Hub? When managing big data, organizations will find that there will be many consumers of the vast amounts of data, ranging from applications and data repositories to humans via various analytics and reporting tools. After all, the data is an expression of the enterprise, and with digital transformation, that enterprise is increasingly expressed in the… Read More
October 14, 2021 Data Warehouse vs Database – Which Should you Choose? Data warehouse vs database should you choose one or the other - or, in some cases, would you need both? Each has a purpose and a value for your organization. Each can be simple or complex; both support organizational decisions. In general, they are complementary. The question becomes which one do I need based… Read More
May 18, 2020 SQLite Equals ETL Heavy Two weeks ago, I likened the performance of SQLite to that of a Banana Slug. Now, some may consider that a bit of hyperbole (and some UC Santa Cruz alumni may feel that I impugned the good name of their mascot, which was not my intent) but the numbers don’t lie. The measurable difference… Read More
January 24, 2020 An Embedded Software Developers Flat File Migration Check List This is the final installment on the series of blogs I wrote on the continued use of flat files and why they are no longer viable for use in the future. The first installment focused on flat files and why embedded software application developers readily adopted them. Then in the second installment, I discussed why embedded… Read More
July 8, 2019 Are You Collecting the Right Data Sources? Quantity as well as quality are so important to your data, but there is a third dimension to your data puzzle that is even more important – content. As your company evaluates new data sources and improvements to your existing data, ask yourself, “Are we collecting the right data?” Here are three tips to… Read More
