November 9, 2020 Actian acknowledged as one of the top workplaces in Austin When I moved to Austin 10 years ago from the California Bay Area, little did I not know that I would be working in a company that gets acknowledged as the Top Workplaces in Austin today. This accolade was nominated and selected by the employees of the company. Actian Corporation came about as a… Read More
October 28, 2020 Eight Reasons Why Avalanche is 8X Faster Than Snowflake 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… Read More
October 27, 2020 Why The AA, a Leading UK Insurer, Selected Actian Avalanche for High-Performance Cloud Analytics We are very excited to share the news that The Automobile Association (AA), the UK's largest motoring organization, selected Actian Avalanche hybrid cloud warehouse for its insurance business to execute its cloud migration strategy. The AA is a leading UK automobile insurer and breakdown service provider that provides vehicle insurance, driving lessons, breakdown coverage,… Read More
August 6, 2020 Machine Learning UDF’s in Avalanche, VectorH, and Vector – Creating UDF’s in Database – Part 2 In the first part of this two-part article, we created the model. In this installment, we will create the UDF’s in database. We can convert the model to Python, and I used m2cgen to transpile the sklearn model to Python model I will be making 3 types of UDF’s, Python UDF JavaScript UDF Saving… Read More
August 6, 2020 Machine Learning UDF’s in Avalanche, VectorH, and Vector – Introduction and Creating the Model – Part 1 Recently in Avalanche, VectorH 6.0, and Vector 6.0, Actian introduced a capability for Scalar user-defined functions (UDF’s). This has given Avalanche, VectorH, and Vector a new dimension to run Machine Learning (ML) models in Python and JavaScript within database. More about UDF’s can be found in our documentation. Model creation is simple with so… Read More
August 5, 2020 How Well Do You Actually Know Your Customers? One of companies’ biggest mistakes is assuming they understand their customers’ needs, preferences and buying behaviors when they are actually just guessing. The better you understand who your customers are, the more successful you will be developing products and services to serve their needs, packaging them in a desirable way and communicating your offers… Read More
June 29, 2020 Connected Data in the Cloud Increases AI System Performance Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the core of the next wave of IT systems, and it is time to get ready. The past year has seen tremendous growth in the adoption of artificial intelligence systems to help companies improve operational insights and provide enhanced customer service experiences. If you aren’t leveraging AI to support your… Read More
June 22, 2020 Connected Data to Drive Service Assurance in IT IT Service Management (ITSM) staff have a unique challenge to provide service assurance across a broad and diverse technology ecosystem. Connected data is essential to enable them to do their job effectively. Your incident and problem management staff don’t know what they don’t know. They can only see the data that is made available… Read More
June 18, 2020 Don’t Just Move Data, Integrate it! If you are simply “lifting and shifting” data from one place to another, you are missing out on the power that a data integration platform can bring you. It is time to look beyond extract, transfer, load (ETL) from individual source systems, and expand your integrations to include multi-source joins that enable you to… 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
January 21, 2020 Why Integration is so critical for Robotic Process Automation Vendors Robotic process automation (RPA) is one of the fastest-growing trends in the IT industry. This next-generation of workflow management capabilities is poised to be an essential enabler for companies seeking to optimize their digitally transformed business processes for peak efficiency. For RPA vendors, one of the critical capabilities that must be developed in your… Read More
December 9, 2019 Why Avalanche and DataConnect are Better Together … Part 3 How Avalanche and DataConnect work together to deliver an end-to-end data management solution Migrating to a cloud data warehouse makes strategic sense in the modern context of cloud services and digital transformation. Operationally, connecting disparate data sources into your cloud data warehouse, managing ongoing change in your IT environment, and delivering on the promises… Read More
September 26, 2019 Observations from Strata Data Conference 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… Read More
June 12, 2019 Connecting to Actian Avalanche via JDBC Actian Avalanche delivers an operational data warehouse as a managed service in the cloud. Its developer-friendly high-performance analytics engine has been proven to outperform other popular analytics platforms without specialized hardware or complicated software development. Requires minimal setup, provides automatic tuning to reduce database administration effort and enables highly-responsive end-user BI reporting. This is… Read More
June 1, 2019 Connecting to Actian Avalanche from Denodo via JDBC Actian Avalanche is the world’s fastest analytic data warehouse delivered as Software as a Service (SaaS). It has been designed for simplicity and doesn’t require any complex tuning to deliver consistent real-time performance for even the most challenging queries. Actian Avalanche is standards based, supporting the latest SQL, ODBC and JDBC standards, which enables it to easily fit into any… Read More
May 21, 2019 Connecting to Actian Avalanche from Pentaho via JDBC Actian Avalanche delivers an operational data warehouse as a managed service in the cloud. Its developer-friendly high-performance analytics engine has been proven to outperform other popular analytics platforms without specialized hardware or complicated software development. Actian Avalanche requires minimal setup, provides automatic tuning to reduce database administration effort and enables highly-responsive end-user BI reporting. This is how to connect… Read More
March 12, 2019 Announcing the Availability of Actian DataConnect on AWS Marketplace We are excited to announce that Actian DataConnect suite of products are now available on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Marketplace. Actian DataConnect is a hybrid integration solution that enables you to quickly and easily design, deploy, and manage integrations on-premises, in the cloud, or in hybrid environments. DataConnect engineered to help you cost-effectively integrate diverse data… Read More
March 8, 2019 Connecting to an Actian X (Ingres) Database from PHP via JDBC We have documented the best way to connect from PHP to an Ingres database via ODBC in an Actian Knowledge Base article called Ingres ODBC with PHP and in a previous post, Connecting to Actian X (Ingres) with PHP and NGINX. Sometimes, however, due to limitations, users may need to use JDBC instead of ODBC… Read More
August 3, 2018 Actian DataConnect v11.3 Released Greetings Actian DataConnect Community, It’s my pleasure to announce the availability of Actian DataConnect version 11.3 and I’d like to introduce you to some amazing new features! Orchestration Invoker The new Orchestration Invoker process design component provides you with the ability to create more reliable and efficient integration templates by invoking combinations of smaller,… Read More
July 11, 2018 Actian Vector Data Ingestion The usefulness of an analytic database is closely tied to its ability to ingest, store, and process vast quantities of data. Data is typically ingested from multiple sources such as operational databases, CSV files, and continuous data streams. In most cases, daily data loads are measured in tens or hundreds of millions of rows,… Read More
May 1, 2018 Deploying Actian OpenROAD Applications with Loadnrun One of the main challenges for an application developer is the deployment of applications. There are many ways this is handled, from using traditional installers to web-based deployments. The initial web deployment option for OpenROAD, Actian's rapid application development and flexible deployment solution, was the eClient where the application itself was hosted on a web… Read More
April 16, 2018 How Actian Vector Helps You Eliminate OLAP Cubes OLAP (OnLine Analytical Processing) Cubes are used extensively today, because it is impossible for many database platforms to analyze large volumes of data quickly. This is because most database software does not fully leverage computing power and memory to deliver optimal performance. Some of the symptoms of this are: Large queries end up hogging… Read More
April 12, 2018 HCL Technologies and Sumeru Equity Partners to Acquire Actian Corporation We’re excited to announce that HCL Technologies (HCL), a leading global technology company, and Sumeru Equity Partners (SEP), a technology-focused private equity firm, have signed a definitive agreement to assume 100 percent ownership of Actian Corporation. For Actian, it means the company will benefit from HCL’s expertise in delivering next generation solutions for the… Read More
March 29, 2018 Ingres (Actian X) Disaster Recovery Most production Ingres (now called Actian X) installations have a need for some degree of disaster recovery (DR). Options range from shipping nightly database checkpoints to off-site storage locations to near real-time replication to a dedicated off-site DR site. Ingres, Actian's enterprise hybrid database, ships with built in checkpoint and journal shipping features which… Read More
March 24, 2018 Actian’s March Topcoder Challenges Actian is sponsoring three challenges on Topcoder this month, featuring our Vector and Zen database products and thousands of dollars in prizes. All you need to do is sign on to Topcoder (for free), read and follow the instructions for the competition, and win! It's that easy. Now, the challenges themselves are all different,… Read More
March 20, 2018 Actian Vector – Community Edition Launches on Azure Marketplace Last November we announced that Actian Vector - Community Edition, our high-performing SQL analytics solution for the cloud, launched for free on the AWS Marketplace. Now we're happy to announce that a similar version has now been released on the Microsoft Azure Marketplace in a similar free-to-use pricing model. If you are a SQL… Read More
March 17, 2018 See Actian at the Gartner Data & Analytics Summit in London Are you in London, England and attending the Gartner Data & Analytics Summit? Why not drop by and see Actian at Booth #S4 where you can discuss the latest and greatest in databases, hybrid data, analytics, Internet of Things, and software innovation at the InterContinental London - The O2 from Sunday, March 18 through… Read More
March 15, 2018 Upgrading to Actian DataConnect Version 9 to Version 11: A Better Journey About a year ago I wrote an article discussing upgrading from Actian DataConnect Version 9 to Version 10 (Actian DataConnect – The Conversion from v9 to v10 does not have to be scary!!) That article used the v9 or v10 Process object to use a script step to do the magic, with code that… Read More
March 12, 2018 Jolt Your Performance with Actian in Detroit and Cambridge This Week Interested in jolting your data analytics and database performance? Join Actian in two separate meetings this week in both Detroit, Michigan and Cambridge Massachusetts to talk about hybrid data, performance, analytics, and dataintegration: Tuesday, March 13: Come to the JOLT YOUR PERFORMANCE BREAKFAST between 7:30–9am at the award winning Apparatus Room Restaurant conveniently located… Read More
March 9, 2018 Making Actian Zen Btrieve API Code More Efficient The release of Service Pack 1 for Zen (PSQL) v13, Actian’s zero-dba, embedded nano-footprint database, provides a number of new features, including one we’re looking at today to make Btrieve API code more efficient -- the GetNextExtended LIKE Support. First, let's review the concept of "Extended Operations." The low-level Btrieve API (also known as the… Read More
February 26, 2018 Get Ready for the Gartner Data & Analytics Summit 2018 in Grapevine, Texas The next big data and analytics conference is right around the corner with the Gartner Data & Analytics Summit, hosted at the Gaylord Texan Resort Hotel & Convention Center in Grapevine, Texas from March 5-8, 2018 and Actian will be present, both on the show floor and in a presentation. Emma McGrattan, SVP, Engineering, will… Read More
February 16, 2018 Austin IoT Meetup – Connecting an Android Phone to Raspberry Pi Using Actian Zen Interested in Actian's newest databases, Zen IoT Server and Zen IoT Core, and want to link them up to something cool and amazing for everyday use like Raspberry Pi? And you live in Austin? You're in luck--you're invited to our Austin office for a special gathering of the Austin Internet of Things Meetup group… Read More
February 9, 2018 Automatically Synchronize Your OLTP and OLAP Tables in Actian X (Ingres 11) A key feature of the latest update to our hybrid database Actian X (Ingres 11) is the inclusion of the x100 analytics engine and support for x100 tables. Adding a world class analytics engine to Actian X’s enterprise OLTP (OnLine Transaction Processing) capability enables a new class of applications that can mix OLTP and analytic… Read More
February 2, 2018 Python and Btrieve 2 on Windows: Accessing Actian Zen Data With No SQL In my previous blog ("Programming the Easy Way: Accessing a PSQL Zen Database with Python and ODBC"), I showed how to easily access an Actian Zen database with Python and ODBC. My next project was to use the new Btrieve 2 feature with Python to directly interface with the data files without using any… Read More
January 17, 2018 Simplifying Development with OpenROAD JSON-RPC With the release of the new patches at the end of December for version 6.2, Actian OpenROAD (our rapid application development and flexible deployment solution) is providing a new functionality in the form of JSON support and JSON-RPC support for OpenROAD Server. Those familiar with OpenROAD would know that an application server was available from version… Read More
January 9, 2018 When BIG Data Doesn’t Have to Be Using a Vector FARM to Make Big Data Analytics Fast and Easy I’ve been working in the IT industry a long time. What goes around, comes around. My favorite example is how centralized mainframe timesharing gave birth to decentralized client-server computing, now we are going back to timesharing, but in the cloud. Technology does… Read More
January 4, 2018 Programming the Easy Way: Accessing a PSQL Zen Database with Python and ODBC As an old-school programmer from a few decades ago, I decided to see how hard it would be to access a Zen (formerly known as PSQL) database from my newly acquired knowledge of Python. In case you're not familiar with it, Zen is Actian's embedded zero-admin, nano-footprint hybrid NoSQL and SQL database software, and… Read More
December 6, 2017 Fast Data Loading from Amazon S3 into Actian Vector via Apache Spark One of the questions we get asked for Vector Cloud deployments is how to load data from Amazon S3 into Vector in a fast and convenient way. This Blog should help answer some of your questions with a step-by-step guide. S3 is a popular object store for different types of data - log files,… Read More
November 16, 2017 Actian Vector – Community Edition Launches on AWS Marketplace 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… Read More
August 19, 2020 What is Enterprise Data Integration, and Why Does it Matter? Enterprise Data Integration is the merging of data across two or more organizations. This scenario is most commonly found when companies are going through mergers or acquisitions, and data from the two companies need to be brought together. Other scenarios for Enterprise Data Integration are joint-partnerships (where two or more companies work together under… Read More
May 9, 2018 Visit Actian at the Internet of Things World Conference May 14-17, 2018 The Internet of Things (IoT) World conference is the largest IoT event in the world, combining some 12,000 industry professionals and innovators with hundreds of workshops, breakout sessions, and a 100,000 square foot expo hall filled with more than 300 exhibitors and startups. The event takes place between Monday, May 14 and Thursday, May… Read More
February 12, 2018 See Actian at TDWI Las Vegas, February 12-14, 2018 Starting off the new year in style by hitting Las Vegas and attending the annual TDWI Conference focused on big data and analytics? Come see Actian at on the exhibit hall floor, Booth #205, Forum Ballroom of Caesar's Palace, at these times: Tuesday, February 13: 11:15am - 2:15pm and 5:00pm-7:00pm (Leadership Summit reception in… Read More
January 12, 2018 Integrating Python with Vector or Actian X Introduction Today we're going to look at how to get started with Actian Vector, our high-performance in-memory analytics database, and Python, one of the most oft-used languages by data scientists in recent times. Using the techniques below, you'll be able to get started with Python using Vector ODBC and JDBC. (You'll be able to use… Read More
December 29, 2017 Powerhouse Integrations – Building Actian DataConnect Integrations That Work, So You Don’t Have To! Recently I wrote an article that was entitled, “Why Actian DataConnect Goes Head to Head with the Big Boys”. I thought it might be beneficial to show a use-case for why this is important. As a developer and data integrator, there are many concepts that are important when designing a product. Some of these… Read More
November 27, 2017 The Big Show: Visit Actian at AWS re:Invent 2017 in Las Vegas The largest cloud computing conference of 2017 is now here in AWS re:Invent and it’s taking over Las Vegas in a big way. An estimated 40,000 engineers, product leads, marketers, technical architects, and expert users from around the world will be descending on The Strip, attending keynotes, bootcamps, demos, hackathons, and in-depth hands-on training… Read More
November 21, 2017 Announcing Actian Vector – Community Edition support for Mac OS X via Docker We’re pleased to announce that Actian Vector 5.0 Community Edition now includes support for Mac OS X via Docker. Over the last few years Mac OS X has become increasingly popular with Developers, as has Docker, the virtualization platform that allows you to bundle applications along with their native OS and run them in… Read More
