February 9, 2023 7 Customer Analytics Techniques to Get to Know Your Customer Better Would you like to know more about your customers to improve engagement? Are you able to make them loyal and increase their lifetime value? These are some of the questions that customer analytics can help answer. Customer analytics, also called customer data analytics, is the systematic examination of a company's customer information and behavior to identify,… Read More
August 1, 2021 The Top 10 Benefits of an Operational Data Warehouse For 2021 The previous blogs in this series discussed the top 5 pitfalls of traditional operational data warehouses and defined the Operational Data Warehouse (ODW) as a potential solution. Below is a list of my Top 10 desirable benefits of an effective ODW: Current. Continuous data updates via “micro-batches” or streamed singleton updates throughout the day… 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
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
June 7, 2020 Actian Vector for Hadoop Enables Fuller SQL Functionality and More Current Data In this second of a three-part blog series (part 1), we'll explain how SQL execution in Actian Vector in Hadoop (VectorH) is much more functional and ready to run in an operational environment, and how the ability for VectorH to handle data updates efficiently can enable your production environment to stay current with the… Read More
June 6, 2020 Actian Shows Exponential Performance Advantages Over Other SQL on Hadoop Alternatives Imagine if reports that currently take many minutes to run in Hadoop could come back with results in seconds. Get answers to detailed questions about sales figures and customer trends in real time. Make revenue predictions based on up-to-date customer metrics across a spectrum of sources. Iterate more quickly simulating different business decisions to… Read More
June 5, 2020 Actian Vector for Hadoop File Format is Faster and More Efficient In this third and last part of the series on Actian Vector in Hadoop (VectorH), we will cover how the VectorH file format supports the performance and efficiency of our data analytics platform to accelerate business insights, as well as some of the other enterprise features that can help businesses move their Hadoop applications… Read More
March 17, 2020 Why you Should Offload Analytics from your Online Transaction Processing Systems into a Data Warehouse Modern businesses are fueled by data. The insights that your data bring are what power decision making, enables you to optimize business processes and respond to changing market conditions. The organizations that have data and manage it well – excel. Those that lack data or struggle to harvest actionable insights from their data have… Read More
July 29, 2019 Exploiting Analytics in the Cloud Without Moving All Your Data There Your company has competing data needs. You need IT systems optimized for real-time transaction processing to serve as the engine for digitally transformed business processes. You also need your data aggregated and optimized for analytics to generate both real-time insights and perform deep data-mining activities. It can be difficult to balance these competing needs… Read More
December 19, 2018 Insights at the Speed of Business Modern businesses move fast and the speed of business is accelerating every day with no sign of slowing. To survive, companies must find ways to remove friction in their systems and business processes – leveraging real-time operational data and translating it into actionable insights that drive activities across the company. From strategic decision-making to… Read More
November 26, 2018 What’s new in Actian DataFlow version 6.6.1? Actian DataFlow is a parallel workflow platform for end-to-end data access, transformation, preparation, and predictive analysis that eliminates performance bottlenecks in your data-intensive applications. Complementary to the Actian Vector analytic database, DataFlow leverages concurrency, parallelism and pipelining to accelerate data movement between locations in your data architecture, creating faster results. DataFlow eliminates memory constraints,… Read More
September 13, 2018 Analyze and Act on Transactional Data in the Moment with an Operational Data Warehouse We all hear about how forward-thinking companies, small and large, need to be more customer focused, even customer obsessed, to be successful in this hypercompetitive world. Data drives knowledge about your customers’ needs and behaviors, so you can actively tailor your messaging and offers to rise above the competition and win their business. This… Read More
June 12, 2018 New Improvements to Security and Performance in Actian Vector 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.… Read More
May 8, 2018 Vector Enterprise Edition Now Available on AWS Marketplace Last week we activated Actian Vector Enterprise Edition on the AWS Marketplace, so now it’s easier to tap into the fastest analytic engine in the cloud to extract insights from your big data. We can prove that claim based on independent benchmarks by MCG that you can view here comparing Vector performance to results… 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
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 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
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 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
December 22, 2017 Fast. Faster. Fastest. I was fortunate enough to attend the Actian Hybrid Data Conference at which Craig Strong, who is Chief Technology and Product Officer at Hubble, talked about how they provide real-time corporate performance management (CPM) though high-speed analytics dashboards. You can watch a video recording of this presentation on the conference sessions page linked here. For… Read More
December 19, 2017 How I analyzed 165 million flight records in seconds on my laptop It was surprisingly easy to analyze 165 million flight records my laptop. It took me just an afternoon following the Actian Evaluation guide that you can download from here. Scientists with Intel over the years to being down the cost of high performance computing. They key vector processing technology feature they needed was to… Read More
December 19, 2017 Database History in the Making: Ingres Meets X100 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… 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 28, 2017 Insight to Insights A fellow recent hire at Actian, Walter Maguire, told me that many organizations get frustrated with having to wait into the late morning for decision support databases to be loaded and indexed or OLAP cubes to be populated with transactional data before sales analysis can be performed. This is not a new problem. I… Read More
September 21, 2017 Delivering Real-Time Reporting at Speed and Scale 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… Read More
September 19, 2017 Vector in Hadoop 5.0 – New Features You Should Care About 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… Read More
May 30, 2017 Predictions for the hybrid data landscape The Age of Data has arrived, with new data sources, targets and processing models proliferating madly across enterprises of all sizes. While data has never been more valuable to a business — it now informs the who, what, where, when and how of decision making — this new hybrid data landscape introduces new challenges.… Read More
August 2, 2016 Hadoop Short Circuit Reads and Database Performance If you've been working with Hadoop then you've likely come across the concept of Short Circuit Reads (SCRs) and how they can aid performance. These days they are mostly enabled by default (although not in "vanilla" Apache or close derivatives like Amazon EMR). Actian VectorH brings high performance SQL, ACID compliance, and enterprise security… Read More
June 20, 2016 Performance Troubleshooting Tips for Actian Vector in Hadoop Actian Vector and Vector in Hadoop are powerful tools for running queries efficiently. However, most users of data analytics platforms seek to find ways to optimize performance to gain incremental query improvements. The Actian Service and Support team works with our customers to identify common areas that should be investigated when trying to improve… Read More
May 26, 2016 Fashion Retailer Maximizes Profits Through Data Driven Insights Kiabi, a global retailer of ready-to-wear fashion at affordable prices based in France needed to replace a legacy data management platform that was unable to support real-time analytics in a high-volume global retail environment. A proof of concept test demonstrated that the Actian Analytics Platform was clearly the performance leader to meet this customer’s real-time data… Read More
May 9, 2016 Accelerating Spark with Actian Vector in Hadoop One of the hottest projects in the Apache Hadoop community is Spark, and we at Actian are pleased to announce a Spark-Vector connector for the Actian Vector in Hadoop platform (VectorH) that links the two together. VectorH provides the fastest and most complete SQL in Hadoop solution, and connecting to Spark opens up interfaces… Read More
May 3, 2016 Amazon EMR as an Easy-to-set-up Hadoop Platform Recently I helped a customer perform an evaluation of Actian Vector in Hadoop (VectorH) to see if it could maintain “a few seconds” performance as the data sizes grew from one to tens of billions of rows (which it did, but that’s not the subject of this entry). The customer in question was only… Read More
May 2, 2016 Taking Advantage of Ordered Data Actian Vector and Vector in Hadoop (VectorH) have a lightweight, but very potent, feature that can give a significant performance boost when querying data that possesses some kind of ordering. This entry takes a look at this feature and describes how to use it. The feature utilises what are referred to as MinMax structures.… Read More
April 28, 2016 Actian Developer Tools available on Github The Actian technology teams have recently posted a number of technical tools and snippets to the Actian account on Github that will be of interest to customers, partners and prospects. We encourage all of you to take a look and make contributions of your own – either to enhance these tools, or else to… Read More
April 27, 2016 Hadoop at 10 Wow – 10 years of Hadoop, what a ride. Actian has been working in the Hadoop ecosystem almost since the beginning, starting in 2007. Actian started working with Hortonworks the moment they launched in 2011. As a pioneer in this space, we have witnessed the whole “boom”. And while Hadoop is continuing to show… Read More
April 14, 2016 Analytics Cube and Beyond Big Data engineering has invented a seemingly endless supply of workaround solutions. These are for both scalability and performance problems. Ultimately, our approach to solving these problems dictates how sustainable they will be. This post compares some modern best practices with pre-processing cube environments. 3 Ways A Hadoop Database Competes With Cube Analytics Software… Read More
August 4, 2014 The Evolution of Data Integration with the Internet of Things Loraine Lawson, always does a wonderful job covering the world of integration, and this article that covers the integration challenges and opportunities of the Internet of Things (IoT) is no exception. Besides big data, I see the IoT as one of the most interesting data integration challenges coming down the road. Perhaps it’s time… Read More
January 28, 2020 Embedded Integration: Put the Analytics Compute Where the Data Lies. Selecting the best location for your analytics compute poses an interesting dilemma leading to thoughtful debate in some companies while others don't even consider the topic. If you're dealing with distributed systems, embedded sensors in machinery, mobile apps, or IoT devices, this topic is for you! Where you locate compute resources for analytics has… Read More
August 19, 2019 Does It Make Sense to Push All Your IoT Data to the Cloud? IoT devices create plenty of data – much more that you might think. When you multiply this amount of data by the number of devices installed in your company’s IT ecosystem, it is apparent IoT is a truly big data challenge. Two common questions IT staff and data management professionals have been asking during… 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
December 27, 2017 High-Performance Realtime-Analytics on Hadoop Data The Challenge I have spent many years working with Actian's customers on database solutions and thought it'd be useful to discuss a recent customer experience at a large media company (I will call it "XYZCo"). This experience is similar to what I continue to see with other customers and the lessons learned apply to… 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
June 27, 2016 Efficient ETL in an Analytical Database? Recently I worked on a POC that required some non-standard thinking. The challenge was that the customer's use case did not only need high performance SQL analytics but also a healthy amount of ETL (Extract, Transform, and Load). More specifically, the requirement was for ELT (or even ETLT if we want to absolutely precise).… Read More
June 13, 2016 Actian Vector Extends Dominance as Certifiably Fastest! Actian announced a new record TPC-H result with Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Intel to demonstrate the big data analytics performance of the new Intel Xeon processor E7-8890 v4. With over 2.14M QphH and $0.38/QphH, Actian Vector sets new records for performance and price/performance on non-clustered systems for the 3000GB scale factor. These numbers beat… Read More
May 4, 2016 Pssst .. Have you heard about VectorH? Hello World! We’ve been busy building some innovative features into the Actian Vector in Hadoop (VectorH) product and we would love to tell you all about them. So, the list of the features and innovations that we have done recently for VectorH… wait .. do you even know what VectorH is about? Yes, it’s… Read More
September 5, 2014 An Analytical Mind: A Smart Interview with Peter Boncz on Vector Processing Known as the Father of Vector Database Processing, Peter Boncz is the Senior Research Scientist at Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI), Professor at VU University Amsterdam, and Chief Technical Advisor to Actian Corporation, the first company to assemble an end-to-end big data analytics platform that runs natively on Hadoop. He architected two breakthrough database… Read More
July 14, 2014 Emergence of the Chief Data Officer Caffeinates Data Integration We often watch new positions sprout up around emerging technology. These days, we see new titles such as the chief cloud officer, and other titles that seem just as trendy. However, the strategic use of data within many enterprises led those in charge to assign data management responsibility to one person; the chief data… Read More
