February 9, 2023 Bringing your Database into the Modern Era The world of database management can be a complex one. Applications continue to be built on top of special-purpose databases that make it hard to merge data. New innovations such as Internet of Things (IoT) sensors are generating never-before-seen quantities of data that must be integrated as well. Here we’ll look at how businesses… Read More
January 29, 2021 From Databases to Knowledge Management Systems for Data Power Databases Databases are everywhere. They store data and information organized by fields and tables. There are different types of databases that organize data into relational tables, hierarchical structures, networks, and objects. Databases can be personal, corporate, and shared resources. They can be used for recording business transactions to support decision making. The value of… Read More
April 6, 2020 Data Warehouse Appliances are Becoming History The era of data warehouse appliances is coming to an end, rapidly being replaced with a new generation of cloud services. The first data warehouse appliance was introduced onto the market in 2003. For nearly 15 years, this market grew with several large technology players, including IBM, Oracle, and Teradata developing or acquiring database… Read More
February 3, 2020 Consolidation of the Database Market and What it Means for Your Data Warehouse A few months ago, Gartner published an update on the database market, which is highlighted in Adam Ronthal’s blog “There is only One DBMS Market” and made a rather profound declaration – the database markets have collapsed. No, the market isn't crashing, it is having the best year ever, what has happened is the… Read More
November 11, 2019 It’s Back to the Future for Flat Files … Part Two Why Embedded Software Application Developers Loath Databases Last week I wrote an initial blog on flat files and why embedded software application developers readily adopted them. Simply put, they’re always there – if you’ve got an Operating System that’s more than a bare-bones executive kernel it’s there and it’s free. Also, flat files are… Read More
September 12, 2019 As AI Algorithms Become More Sophisticated in Edge Devices, Persistent Data Requirements Must Advance at the Same Pace Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems seem to be everywhere and for a good reason. AI represents the next generation of computing capabilities. It is leveraging the speed and scale of cloud computing to deliver not only high-speed automation but also continuous learning and adaptation capabilities that can finally match the pace of change in the… Read More
July 31, 2019 Should You Have Separate Document, Time-Series, NoSQL and SQL Databases or Can a Single Database Support All of These Data Types and Requirements? Managing and analyzing heterogeneous data is a challenge for most companies, which the oncoming wave of Edge Computing-generated datasets has only exacerbated. This challenge stems from a rather large “data-type mismatch” as well as how and where data has been incorporated into applications and business process. How did we arrive here? At one time,… 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 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
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
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
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 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 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 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 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 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
August 8, 2017 Can Your Applications Find You? 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… 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
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
