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 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
January 14, 2020 All Cloud Data Warehouses are NOT Created Equal There are a lot of myths and misconceptions about cloud data warehouses. One of the biggest ones is that all cloud data warehouses cost the same. On the surface, cloud data warehouse vendors may talk the same language – describing similar features, benefits and touting the performance gains of operating in the cloud. But… Read More
January 13, 2020 Why DataConnect Inside is the Right Platform for Delivering Embedded Integration Many software as a service (SaaS) companies are looking at embedding integration capabilities into their SaaS offerings as a way of making their solutions both more appealing to customers and more profitable for them as providers. Embedded integration can make SaaS solutions easier to adopt, cheaper to integrate and more difficult to replace when… Read More
December 2, 2019 Why Avalanche and DataConnect are Better Together … Part 2 Checklist: Critical Capabilities to Consider when Selecting a Data Integration Vendor That Enables Real-Time Analytics Use Cases 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… 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
October 24, 2019 Optimizing Cloud Compute and Data Storage for Data Analytics When architecting your data warehouse solution, separating compute and data storage is extremely important for both operational sustainability and economic efficiency. Different things drive the technical needs for each of these, the capacity demands of the organization are different, and the best solution requires optimizing compute and data storage separately. Storage capacity is a… Read More
August 15, 2019 Cloud Software Development: Planning the Journey For software companies developing new solutions in the cloud, the overall mission can be a daunting proposition. Cloud is an ever-evolving landscape, where one piece of technology may be popular one day, only to be replaced for something better a little while later. Then, there is a slew of tech jargon along with an… Read More
August 7, 2019 Using a Cloud Data Warehouse to Support Localized Systems Over the past few years, we’ve seen an increasing trend of regional governments applying unique restrictions and controls on where data is stored and how it is managed for users and businesses in their jurisdiction. The EU and Japan have recently imposed some strict rules about data export. A cloud data warehouse can be… Read More
August 5, 2019 Considering Cloud Migration? First, Read This Checklist. Most modern companies have fully embraced the cloud as the preferred place to host the applications that their businesses use. Many new applications are “cloud-native” or are designed specifically for operating in the cloud, while many of the legacy applications that your company uses today may have been designed to run on hardware in… Read More
July 30, 2019 What You Should Know Before Moving to a Multi-Cloud Environment Most IT leaders will agree: the cloud is the right place to host and operate many of their applications and systems. What isn’t quite as clear for these leaders is “which cloud” they should use. The answer is “There is no right answer.” Each company (and application) has its own unique set of technical… Read More
June 10, 2019 2019 Data Management Trends and How They Will Affect Integration 2019 is becoming an exciting year for the data management community. Many of the trends of the past few years have successfully made the transition from emerging concepts to mainstream solution approaches. While trends are important building blocks about how companies approach their data management today, they are also providing insights into future capabilities… 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
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
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
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
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
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
May 4, 2017 Connecting ServiceNow to other applications’ data doesn’t have to be difficult We're excited to be at Knowledge17 this year to show how the Actian hybrid integration platform can connect ServiceNow to your existing data sources, including on-premises and cloud-based applications. The ServiceNow model can define, structure and automate the flow of work within your enterprise, but only if you can connect to other applications and… 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
January 12, 2021 Approaching Holistic Data Models for Organizational Efficiency Why model anything? There are many types of models with many types of usages, such as physical, scientific, mathematical, computer, concrete, communication, etc. The overall purpose is to define, support analysis and decisions, and to communicate or validate a system or perspective. Models can also be used to help speed things up or slow… 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
January 9, 2020 Why Total Cost of Ownership is the Wrong KPI for a Cloud Data Warehouse Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) has been an essential Key Performance Indicator (KPI) for the IT industry for many decades – and rightfully so. Large scale capital expenditures for IT infrastructure and data center resources were incurred at the onset of a project, allocated to different business functions and amortized (along with maintenance and… Read More
October 29, 2019 Is now the right time to modernize your data warehouse? Technology is continually changing and determining the right time to upgrade and modernize can be tricky. If you adopt new technology too soon, this may result in churn within your organization and the implementation of immature solutions that may not meet your needs. If you wait too long, you miss out on market opportunities… 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
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
