Today’s digital-first world has placed a tremendous emphasis on using enterprise data intelligently to drive important business decisions and manage risk. High-quality datasets function as the fuel for enterprises looking to map customers, track where they are in the lifecycle, and inform next steps on how to better engage them. However, simply having access…
Data-driven roles are in demand. According to research firm Deloitte, the number of postings for positions in data science, data engineering, machine learning (ML), and visualization now surpasses those for more familiar skill sets such as customer service, marketing, and public relations (PR). For database administrators (DBAs), business technologists, and data engineers, this increasing…
Which cloud makes sense? Nothing is perfect, but we want to approach perfection with continuous improvement and the management of risk in our business environments. IT capabilities and resources underpin our business environments. On-premise capabilities and cloud capabilities have to deliver a return on investment (ROI) for our efforts and, at the same time,…
Everyone in an organization makes decisions every day. They go through the process of identifying that a decision needs to be made, then gather data and relevant information from various sources to identify the choices that they can make. By Analyzing the data and other considerations based on their experience, they can make a…
In a year dominated by the dark cloud of the COVID-19 pandemic and the tragedies that ensued, we seem to be ending on a hopeful note. We saw the incredible power of human ingenuity, as not one but several vaccines have been developed at breakneck speed, surpassing even the most optimistic of expectations. We…
Defining good service All organizations want to provide good service to their customers. There are many definitions of what good service is from a giving and receiving perspective. Good and excellent service can mean the same thing in many cases. Then there is exceptional service; this is the type of service many organizations try…
Earlier this month, I kicked off a series of blogs about SQLite. The first looked at the advantages that SQLite offers over both flat files and the heavier lift of an enterprise-grade SQL databases – and it does offer distinct advantages over both. To a point. And that point was five years ago. Here's…
In December, January, and February, I posted a short series of blogs on Flat file systems. The series of blogs focus 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…
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…
Are you new to Actian Zen and want to learn how to get started with it? Check out our newly built YouTube channel! Topics include: Authorize an Actian Zen license for Windows Install the Actian Zen Backup Agent for Windows Configure the Actian Zen Backup Agent for Windows Instal Actian Zen into Linux Install…
The proliferation of Operational Technology (OT) within companies is increasing, which has led many to ask whether this will lead to standardization of how operational technology generated data is managed? The answer is “it’s complicated.” There is unlikely to be standardization of the data individual operational technology devices generate, but there will be new…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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,…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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,…
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…
One important trend in database management is integrating location data better to improve insights about events and activities that matter to your business. …Interest in analyzing geospatial/location data has increased over the past four years from 26% to 36%.” Source: Gartner Survey Analysis: Big Data Investments Begin Tapering in 2016, September 2016 Tracking customer…
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.…
This is part 2 of our conversation with Forrester analyst Michele Goetz. Please click here to read the first post: Rethink Hybrid for the Data-Driven Enterprise. After a recent Actian webinar featuring Forrester Research, John Bard, senior director of product marketing at Actian, asked Forrester principal analyst Michele Goetz more about next-generation data management solutions.…
Last week, Actian introduced the the new Ingres - Actian X Hybrid Database, combining the industry-leading Ingres RBMS with the record breaking analytic database Vector. With column-based storage, vector processing, multi-core parallelism (and more), Actian X puts amazing performance in the hands of Ingres developers. We've also bundled two other really big features: 1)…
One of the most exciting trends for the balance of this decade will be HTAP, or Hybrid Transactional/Analytical Processing - a recently-coined term representing the next generation of hybrid, converged software infrastructure that can handle both traditional Transactional Data Management AND modern Analytic Data Management workloads. Every business is struggling to find new tools…
After a recent Actian webinar featuring Forrester Research, John Bard, senior director of product marketing at Actian, asked Forrester principal analyst Michele Goetz more about the trends in today's enterprise data market. Here is the first part of that conversation: John Bard, Actian: The enterprise market tends to think of “hybrid” as on-premises or cloud,…
Imagine this scenario - you have just "clicked" on an item that you are ordering online. What kind of "data trail" have you generated? Well, you are sure to have generated a transaction - the kind of "business event" that goes into a seller's accounting system, and then on to their data warehouse for subsequent sales…
One of the things I talk to organizations about regularly when they’re trying to get their heads around big data and analytics is the importance of data quality before they start with analytics. Here, I am reminded of the old database acronym of GIGO (garbage in, garbage out), and yet I am astounded by…
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…
Embarking on a big data project can be daunting. If you believe that you need insight into your business activity, that you have to collect a large “big data” stash, and that you need to analyze it all to generate worthwhile insight, you will likely feel swamped by the task ahead to get any…
Cloud economics is a relatively new term, but it is growing in importance as businesses increasingly move their data to the cloud. As more organizations look for new ways to model their business in support of scalability and agility, it has become imperative that they better understand the short and long-term costs of cloud…
Early in my career I studied Systems Engineering at night which is where I first came across the term IPO which is an acronym for Input-Processing-Output. My lecturer taught us every software function has three basic sequential steps, reading input data, processing that data and eventually outputting it. In a more complex system, such…
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…
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…
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…
Telemetry is the automated communications process by which measurements are made and data collected at remote points. The data is then transmitted to receiving equipment for monitoring. The word ‘telemetry’ is derived from Greek roots: tele = remote, and metron = measure. Telemetry is not a new concept, that’s for sure. We’ve been watching…
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…