November 9, 2021 Performance Testing Production Workloads for Ingres and Vector One of the main concerns of Ingres and Vector customers whose systems need to undergo a significant change, such as major version upgrades, OS migration, major software releases, increased volumes of usage, etc, is how to properly test the database under realistic conditions in a test environment. Some customers have heard of the Query,… 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
January 7, 2019 Enabling Agility with Real-Time Data The speed of change in modern business is accelerating. New technologies, globalization, regulatory changes and competitors entering and leaving the market are just a few examples of the types of environmental forces that bombard companies every day. Developing a sustainable, competitive advantage requires company leaders to identify and respond to opportunities and threats quickly,… 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
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
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 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
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
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
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
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
November 1, 2017 The X-Vector As an employee new to Actian I decided to dig into what makes Actian Vector a star performer. Three specific qualities, covered below, caught my eye as I reviewed the technical overview. Vectorization: When I first heard this term, my memory went back to 30 years ago, when IBM offered my employer, Watson Calculating Services… 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
April 27, 2017 Introducing Actian X – the new Ingres 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)… Read More
April 26, 2017 HTAP at Actian: The Best of Both Worlds in Data Management 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… Read More
April 19, 2017 Hybrid Data is a Gamechanger 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… Read More
April 17, 2017 The Start of Something Really Big It is rare in life that one gets an opportunity to step back, take a fresh look and reset one’s mission and trajectory. For Actian, today is such a day, as we launch a new vision, a new product solution portfolio and of course, a new tag line. Got to have a new tag… 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 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
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
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
November 15, 2017 Sparking a Revolution at Big Data London If you’re visiting what’s billed as the United Kingdom’s largest data and analytics events, you know that Big Data London at the Olympia promises to be a massive gathering of experts and analysts across the fields of Big Data, machine learning, AI, cloud technologies, and more. You’ll be able to learn from numerous pioneers… 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
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
