Data Warehouse

Actian Vector – Community Edition Launches on AWS Marketplace

Actian Corporation

November 16, 2017

I’m excited to announce that Actian Vector – Community Edition is now available on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Marketplace.

The Community Edition is delivered as an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) and is compatible with the AWS 1-Click launch experience.

Why is This Important for You As a Developer?

If you are a SQL analytics application or solution developer who is considering building a high-performing SQL analytics solution in the Cloud or struggling with the cost, performance, or maintenance overhead of your existing SQL analytics application in the Cloud, then consider Vector Community Edition as the SQL database that drives your application.

What Makes Vector Different?

Vector is different in a number of ways. It was built from the ground up to utilize modern hardware architecture in ways that no other product can. Vector includes a number of innovations that exploit available features in a modern CPU such as SIMD2 instructions, larger chip caches, super-scalar functions, out-of-order execution, and hardware-accelerated string-based operations to name a few. You can find an exhaustive list in the Vector Whitepaper.

These innovations that make Actian Vector achieve record performance and price/performance levels for the Transaction Processing Performance Council’s Industry Standard TPC-H benchmark. Additionally, Vector’s innovations can significantly impact your application performance. The users or services that interact with your application can take action much more quickly since you can provide them insights much faster than before.

If doing fast SQL analytics is important to your application or service and you’re struggling to do it economically, Vector can help you.

Vector also requires minimal tuning. You load your large analytic datasets into it and run your queries to get back results almost instantaneously. This frees you from doing complex DBA tasks to focus on your application/service instead.

Could You Highlight Some Use Cases for Vector?

Vector can be used for different kinds of analytics applications such as Micro-Segmentation, Campaign Optimization, Market Basket Analysis, Churn Analysis, and so on. For more details you can look at some of the use cases at Actian.com.

What’s Special About This AWS Marketplace Version?

With integration into AWS Marketplace, we’ve greatly simplified Vector deployment. You don’t have to “find” a machine to “download” and “install” Vector anymore. You can deploy it on the AWS Cloud on your choice of hardware and in your selected region with literally one click.

We’ve also added a few nice touches such as automatically configuring Vector when you launch it. This ensures that Vector is tuned to the EC2 instance type that you have chosen to deploy on so that it provides great out-of-the-gate performance. We’ve also ensured that if you change the instance type, it will detect this and use the newly available resources (RAM, CPUs, etc.); this supports both a scale-up or scale-down scenario.

Last, but not the least, we’ve provided a real-world sample airline dataset of 175 million rows from the Bureau of Transportation Statistics that enables you to analyze flight delays by running provided SQL queries. You will be impressed by the speed of these queries. If you’re feeling adventurous, you can use that analysis insight to influence booking your next flight 🙂

How Much Does it Cost?

Vector – Community Edition is free to use, and you are welcome to develop whatever you want. You pay only for the underlying AWS infrastructure. The AWS Marketplace presents this cost in a very transparent manner so that you can make a good upfront decision. You won’t be charged for computing resources if you stop your instance (for example, during idle time) and restart it later.

The Community Edition is limited to 250 GB of uncompressed data. If your requirements exceed this, we’d be happy to set you up with an Evaluation version that works with larger data sizes.

How Can I Try the Community Edition?

Head over to the AWS Marketplace listing and proceed with deployment. All you need is an AWS account.

About Actian Corporation

Actian is helping businesses build a bridge to a data-defined future. We’re doing this by delivering scalable cloud technologies while protecting customers’ investments in existing platforms. Our patented technology has enabled us to maintain a 10-20X performance edge against competitors large and small in the mission-critical data management market. The most data-intensive enterprises in financial services, retail, telecommunications, media, healthcare and manufacturing trust Actian to solve their toughest data challenges.