Using DataConnect to Acquire, Prepare and Deliver Data to Avalanche By Sampa Choudhuri October 18, 2019 Actian recently announced the availability of Avalanche on the Azure platform, extending the capabilities already available on AWS. This announcement is exciting news for customers because it means greater flexibility and choice in selecting cloud operating environments as well as creating the opportunity for a multi-cloud deployment. Actian DataConnect enhances the capabilities of Avalanche with a scalable Integration Platform as a Service (IPaaS) offering to help you manage connections from all of your source systems into your Avalanche data warehouse. With DataConnect, you will have the tools to acquire, prepare and deliver data to Avalanche with ease. Establish connections to any source UniversalConnect provides the capabilities to establish data connections for any source, including APIs, SaaS solutions, files, databases, mainframe systems, and on-premises applications. This is important because your IT environment is diverse, but the data insights you need to span the breadth of your enterprise. With UniversalConnect, you can connect your legacy systems, existing data stores, and even third-party platforms into Avalanche to make the full enterprise dataset available for analysis and reporting. Flexible integration patterns With DataConnect, you can execute integrations using any integration pattern, including scheduled batch processing, REST APIs, event listeners, and streaming data. Having multiple integration patterns available is because not all your data connections are the same. Real-time streaming data needs to be processed quickly to harvest maximum analytical value while some transactional data (such as that used for planning) only need to be updated periodically. The key is making sure you have the most current and correct data available for analysis at the time that it needs to be consumed. DataConnect gives you great flexibility to select the integration patterns that are best for your business. Design integration workflows with DataConnect Studio Managing data in your business is more than establishing a bunch of connections. DataConnect Studio gives you the capabilities to design workflows to orchestrate the flow of data throughout your IT environment. For example, you might want to: Extract from a SaaS system like Salesforce or NetSuite Standardize and enrich the data using simple functions, joins, etc. Transform into a simple format like CSV and optionally add columns to tag data or engineer additional data elements Deliver the file to a data lake (i.e., S3, ADL) Dynamically generate SQL statements based on the file’s schema Execute SQL commands by pushing them down to the database server for optimal processing Create an external table reference to the delivered CSV file so that Avalanche can query against it directly Define subsequent runs of the integration workflow to refresh the data set The release of Avalanche on Azure opens up a host of new opportunities for you to modernize your data management capabilities and move your data warehouse to the cloud. DataConnect provides the tools to connect all your data sources into the new cloud data warehouse environment so you can get the most value out of this investment. The Avalanche platform works best when paired with a scalable IPaaS solution like DataConnect that includes robust tools for establishing connections, acquiring data sets, preparing, and then delivering them into the Avalanche data warehouse. To learn more about the DataConnect solutions and how it supports your Avalanche deployment, visit www.actian.com/dataconnect About Sampa Choudhuri Sampa is the Director of Product Marketing for Actian focusing on messaging, sales enablement and go-to market activities for Data Integration product line. She comes from an enterprise technology background, having worked in software, hardware, networking and security for companies like Cisco, Sun Microsystems and Symantec. Her experience ranges from product and partner marketing to market analysis and sales enablement. She has a keen interest in new technologies in the space. With an MBA from Santa Clara University, she brings a balanced acumen of technical and marketing skills to understand and position solutions to better help customers in today’s ever-changing complex IT landscape. When she is not working, she enjoys traveling, hiking, photography and spending time with her family.
