June 8, 2023 7 Surefire Strategies to Instantly Improve Your Data Quality Data quality is one of the most important aspects of any successful data strategy, and it’s essential to ensure that the data you collect and store is accurate and reliable. Poor data quality can lead to costly mistakes in decision-making, inaccurate predictions, and ineffective strategies. Data quality is essential in any organization, and there… Read More
June 1, 2023 Using Data to Improve Your ROI Just Got Easier! Are your data analytics providing a positive return on investment (ROI) for your organization? Unfortunately, the answer may be no because the data isn’t offering enough value, meaning that it isn’t positively impacting business outcomes. Too often, data platforms are information graveyards. This may sound harsh, but Forrester estimates that less than 0.5% of all… Read More
May 30, 2023 Real-Time Data Analytics During Uncertain Times Are we in a recession? Not in the U.S., according to some economists, a recession is defined as two consecutive quarters of negative gross domestic product (GDP) growth. But most will agree that we are living in uncertain times with the recent failure of two large banks, inflation, widespread layoffs in the technology sector,… Read More
May 19, 2023 Top Bottlenecks to Data Management Platform Adoption A data management platform (DMP) collects, manages, and analyzes data. This may sound just like a data analytics platform, but a DMP’s scope and purpose are more specific. It gathers audience data which is information about people who respond to advertisements or visit websites or other digital properties. The DMP uses this data to… Read More
May 19, 2023 Are You Accurately Assessing Data? Here are 7 Ways to Improve Data quality is essential for delivering reliable analytics that business users and decision-makers trust. Organizations should assess their data to ensure it meets their quality standards. Data quality management (DQM) is the practice of using data to serve an organization’s purposes with flexibility and agility. An assessment can also find gaps in data, such… Read More
May 4, 2023 How Your Peers are Experiencing their Journeys to the Cloud According to new customer research from Actian, “Data Analytics Journey to the Cloud,” over 70% of companies are mandating that all new data analytics applications must use cloud-based platforms. Our research reveals many good reasons why the rush to the cloud is on. It also shows that organizations can run into cloud migration roadblocks,… Read More
April 27, 2023 Using Cloud Data Analytics to Drive Engagement The decisions a business makes to help drive revenue and increase customer loyalty are only as good as the available data being referenced. Given the state of consumer demands and the changing ways they prefer to interact with brands, now is a crucial time for businesses to take stock of their cloud data analytics… Read More
April 25, 2023 Best Practices for Using Data to Optimize Your Supply Chain When a company is data-driven, it makes strategic decisions based on data analysis and interpretation rather than mere intuition. A data-driven approach to supply chain management is the key to building a strong supply chain, one that’s efficient, resilient, and that can easily adapt to changing business conditions. How exactly you can best incorporate… Read More
April 21, 2023 6 Things You Must Know About Data Modernization Data is the heart of digital transformation and the digital+ economy. Data modernization moves data from siloed legacy systems to the digital world to help organizations optimize their use of data as a strategic asset. For a successful data modernization journey, the following are some important things you need to know: #1. Data Strategy A data… Read More
April 14, 2023 Top Technical Requirements for Embedded Analytics What is Embedded Analytics? More employees making decisions based on data insights leads to better business outcomes. Increasingly, data analytics needs to be surfaced to users via the right medium to inform better and faster decisions. This is why embedded analytics has emerged as an important way to help organizations unlock the potential of… Read More
April 12, 2023 Top Technical Requirements for Embedded Analytics What is Embedded Analytics? More employees making decisions based on data insights leads to better business outcomes. Increasingly, data analytics needs to be surfaced to users via the right medium to inform better and faster decisions. This is why embedded analytics has emerged as an important way to help organizations unlock the potential of… Read More
April 7, 2023 REAL Real-time Data Analytics: When Seconds Matter According to Gartner, real-time analytics is the discipline that applies logic and mathematics to data to provide insights for making better decisions quickly. For some use cases, real-time means analytics is completed within a few seconds after the arrival of new data. Actian calls this REAL real-time data analytics. Analytics solutions vary greatly in… Read More
March 30, 2023 Deciphering the Data Story Behind Supply Chain Analytics When it comes to supply chain data, there’s an intriguing story to be told. If businesses have access to accurate data in real time about their supply chain operations, they have tremendous opportunities to increase efficiency, reduce costs, and grow revenue. Here’s a look at some of the types of supply chain data and… Read More
March 28, 2023 Are you Building Your Data Strategy to Scale? A data strategy is a long-term plan that defines the infrastructure, people, tools, organization, and processes to manage information assets. The goal of a data strategy is to help a business leverage its data to support decision making. To make the plan a reality, the data strategy must scale. Here are a few pointers… Read More
March 23, 2023 Discover the Top 5 Data Quality Issues – And How to Fix Them! Poor quality data can lead to inaccurate insights, wasted resources, and decreased customer satisfaction. It is essential to ensure that all of your data is accurate and up-to-date to make the best decisions. Still, common issues and mistakes costs organizations millions of dollars annually in lost revenue opportunities and resource productivity. Thankfully, these pitfalls… Read More
March 20, 2023 What Makes a Great Machine Learning Platform? Machine learning is a type of artificial intelligence that provides machines the ability to automatically learn from historical data to identify patterns and make predictions. Machine learning implementation can be complex and success hinges on using the right integration, management, and analytics foundation. The Actian Data Platform is an excellent choice for deploying machine… Read More
March 17, 2023 How to Use Data to Get More Visibility into Your Supply Chain Supply chains have undergone—and continue to experience—major changes and disruption. Worker shortages, rapidly changing customer demands, logistics problems, transportation bottlenecks, and other factors have all contributed to challenges. Even sales patterns that used to be easy to predict, such as those based on holidays and seasonal buying, have become much harder to understand, amplifying… Read More
March 17, 2023 Data Analytics for Supply Chain Managers If you haven’t already seen Astrid Eira’s article in FinancesOnline, “14 Supply Chain Trends for 2022/2023: New Predictions To Watch Out For”, I highly recommend it for insights into current supply chain developments and challenges. Eira identifies analytics as the top technology priority in the supply chain industry, with 62% of organizations reporting limited… Read More
March 15, 2023 How Application Analytics Can Optimize Your Customer Experience Strategy With growing concerns of a recession, many application providers are turning their attention to developing a better customer experience strategy for their existing customers. This strategy often includes application analytics to improve customer retention and growth. Here’s a quick look at what application analytics is and ways to use it to measure and improve… Read More
February 28, 2023 5 Ways to Optimize Behavior Analysis for CX Customers are telling you what they want from your business. Are you listening? Do you even have the ability to listen so you can predict what they’ll do next? If not, it’s going to be very difficult to meet customer expectations by providing personalized and meaningful interactions. With the right platform and strategy, businesses… Read More
February 28, 2023 5 Important Customer Experience Scoring Methods After reading “Forrester 2023 Customer Experience Predictions”, it was surprising to see one of its projections – 20% of customer experience (CX) programs will disappear this year. Forrester explains that companies for which great CX is not part of their brand identity will demand proof that CX spending is necessary. Unfortunately, 54% of CX… Read More
February 28, 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
February 28, 2023 6 Predictive Analytics Steps to Reduce Customer Churn Keeping customer churn in check is dire, as it typically costs more to acquire a customer than to retain customers. To help businesses retain their customers, data scientists and IT analysts should consider customer churn analysis to better predict customer behavior. Here’s a quick overview of the tools necessary to predict customer churn. Calculate… Read More
February 23, 2023 Embracing Customer Profiling and Data Management Defining exceptional service Organizations always aim to give their customers the best experiences. There are several interpretations of what constitutes good and excellent service, and sometimes these terms are used interchangeably. However, many companies fail to achieve exceptional service because they do not understand their customers. Delivering any level of service requires that we… Read More
February 21, 2023 9 Essential Blog Articles to Help You Know Your Customer Better Competition for customers is more intense than ever. And landing customers is only half the battle. Keeping them happy is the other half. Creating customers for life entails nurturing relationships and predicting changing needs, or risk losing customers to competitors. Innovative marketers understand the importance of knowing their customers so they can meet their… Read More
February 16, 2023 5 Tips to Transition from Multichannel to Omnichannel Customers want outcomes and consistency as they move across their preferred channels. However, many organizations are struggling to transition from multichannel marketing strategies to omnichannel marketing strategies. What is Multichannel? A channel is any place where a customer interacts with the company. Most businesses rely on a mix of channels to interact with their customers… Read More
February 14, 2023 7 Ways Market Basket Analysis Can Make You More Money Market basket analysis, also referred to as affinity analysis, uses machine learning to increase sales by analyzing customer purchasing patterns. You can use market basket analysis for analyzing large data sets, such as purchase history, to reveal products and product groups, that customers are likely to purchase together. Market basket analysis is a very valuable… Read More
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
February 2, 2023 How to Protect Your Cloud Data Platform The Cost of a Data Breach Report 2022, conducted by Ponemon Institute, found that data security breaches now cost companies $4.34 million per incident on average – the highest cost in the 18-year history of the report. Forty-five percent of all breaches were cloud-based. This percentage is likely to increase, given that 43% of… Read More
January 26, 2023 Three Steps to Better Data Management in 2023 Data management is a vital part of every modern organization. The best businesses today are using their data to inform business strategy, improve customer interactions and ultimately benefit the bottom line. So how can you improve your company’s data management system to reap maximum benefits in the new year? Let’s look at three tips… Read More
January 24, 2023 Building a Data Management Tech Stack for Tomorrow, Today An effective data management tech stack is essential to the health and success of any business, regardless of industry. Today, data is generated at faster rates and higher volumes than ever before, so businesses need systems that are unified and agile in order to keep up. As businesses try to keep up with the… Read More
January 19, 2023 Are you Aligned with the Future of Big Data? Global data has been rapidly growing for more than a decade, snowballing into massive quantities of data available to businesses today. Data is aggregated everywhere on the Internet – through web searches, social media, work files and text messages – as well as via IoT devices and sensors. This has led to impressive market… Read More
January 10, 2023 Prioritizing Data Protection for Data Managers Today’s data managers face numerous data-related obstacles on a regular basis – a surge in the pace of digital transformation, datasets growing increasingly more complex, and the proliferation of data by volume, just to name a few. However, one issue that is quickly surging up the priority list is the protection of data within… Read More
December 20, 2022 What is a Data Fabric and Why Do You Need It? What is a Data Fabric, Anyway? The data fabric has become a rising trend in technology over the last several years. Gartner defines a data fabric as: “a design concept that serves as an integrated layer (fabric) of data and connecting processes. A data fabric utilizes continuous analytics over existing, discoverable, and inferenced metadata… Read More
December 14, 2022 How to Overcome Painful Data Management Challenges and Deliver Impactful Customer Experiences An impactful customer experience (CX) requires accurate and relevant data that’s easy to access, manage, and use. For businesses today, this data is the lifeblood for knowing more about customers to optimize CX. However, many organizations are saddled with data management challenges that reveal roadblocks to this data, resulting in an inaccurate and incomplete… Read More
December 7, 2022 Uplevel Your Cloud Migration Strategy – No Matter the Size of Your Organization Cloud migration and digital transformation are among the top ways for businesses to modernize and keep pace alongside competitors. Moving these endeavors forward is more about the underlying parts involved than the infrastructure. Enabling data-driven operations and intelligence can help ensure success. When businesses begin their transformation and modernization journey, it may be inevitable… Read More
December 1, 2022 Data Silos Suck. Here’s How to Break Them Down Data management issues are common among businesses today. These issues have had direct negative impact for marketing departments, with over 60% of CMOs agreeing that gaps in marketing data and analytics (D&A) and marketing technology are hindering strategic growth strategies. Data and systems stored in silos represent a huge problem for data managers, who… Read More
November 21, 2022 Boosting CX through IoT and Edge Computing While not a new concept, edge computing is gaining steam, with more businesses embracing this technology at a breakneck pace. A recent Gartner report found that in 2022 alone, enterprises will create and process over 50% of the data they generate at the edge, outside the traditional data center or cloud infrastructure. This number… Read More
November 9, 2022 Management and Governance: Two Key Components of a Successful Data Strategy It’s no secret that businesses are using their abundance of data to generate insights that will advance their position in the marketplace or to make strategic decisions that will enhance value for their customers. Businesses that get the most out of their data aren’t those that happen to collect the most data, but those… Read More
September 22, 2022 What is the Future of Data Quality Management (DQM)? 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… Read More
June 3, 2022 Technical Trifecta: The Future of Data Professionals 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… Read More
March 31, 2022 Zen Edge Database and Ado.net on Raspberry Pi Do you have a data-centric Windows application you want to run at the Edge? If so, this article demonstrates an easy and affordable way to accomplish this by using the Zen Enterprise Database through Ado.net on a Raspberry Pi. Raspberry Pi features a 64-bit ARM processor, can accommodate several operating systems, and cost around… Read More
February 25, 2022 5 Uses Cases for Hybrid Cloud Data Management With the rise of cloud computing, many organizations are opting to use a hybrid approach to their data management. Even though many companies still rely on on-premises storage, the benefits of having cloud storage as a backup or disaster recovery plan can be significant. This post will give you five of the most popular… Read More
February 10, 2022 Data Democratization: Promise vs Reality Enabling universal access to data can create opportunities to generate new revenue and drive operational efficiencies throughout an organization. Even more importantly, data democratization, as it’s known, is crucial to business transformation. For that reason, vendors have made a lot of promises about enabling data democratization—and not all have panned out. For instance, various… Read More
January 28, 2022 Engineered Decision Intelligence: The Best Way Forward Part 1 Part 1: You Need a Data Fabric Among Gartner’s top 10 data and analytics trends for 2021 is engineered decision intelligence.[1] That raises two compelling questions: What is this? and Why should you care? Engineered business intelligence is, when you think about it, just what it says: a deliberate process to deriving business intelligence… Read More
November 29, 2021 Developing your Data DNA In a world where everything is changing too quickly, the evolution towards agile, interoperable data services is a welcome change. Data is now able to be delivered as a service, without the need for costly investments in data centers and the resources needed to manage them. As more companies embrace the cloud, data integration… Read More
November 22, 2021 Bloor Spotlight Highlights How Actian’s Ingres NeXt Strategy Avoids Common Modernization Pitfalls Digital transformation requires use of the latest technologies. However, as you probably already know, modernizing a mission-critical database and the applications that interact with it can be risky and expensive, often turning into a long disruptive journey. But I have good news! According to a recent Bloor Spotlight report, Actian’s Ingres NeXt strategy for modernizing Ingres and OpenROAD applications either… Read More
September 30, 2021 DataOps: How to Turn Data into Actionable Insights Enterprises have struggled to collaborate well around their data, which can impact everything from digital transformation to advanced concepts like AI and ML. DataOps is not without challenges; building, managing, and scaling data pipelines requires careful thought around reusability, portability across infrastructure and applications, and long term maintenance and governance. And these are just… Read More
September 22, 2021 What’s New in Zen V15: Easily Tracking Data Changes Data maintenance is an ongoing requirement in every database environment. Archiving historic data, synchronizing data after off-line access, or auditing changed data are all issues that typically require customized programming. Most of these solutions often need database design changes or time-consuming processes to complete these tasks. With the release of Zen v15, there is… Read More
July 17, 2021 It’s Time for Data Historians to Become … History Database Historians...History? Why a modern time-series capable database can simplify yet enhance time-series data analysis. Despite the professorial image the term suggests, a data historian is not an instructor or researcher, but a purpose-build software solution. And evolutions in how operational data is used and managed have eclipsed the need for data historian software… Read More
February 10, 2021 Building a Cohesive Data Management Strategy for Supply Chain Visibility Business strategy A business strategy consists of setting goals, objectives, and priorities for the business vision and mission. The strategy owners use their portfolios of assets, services, and products to achieve the business's goals. A business will often have multiple strategies, such as having a digital strategy that supports their service or product strategy.… Read More
January 12, 2021 Leveraging IoT and Industry Data for Managing Experiences and Decisions Leveraging data Data is everywhere. Data comes from social interactions, personal devices, cloud service interactions, the environment, and many other places and things. There is a wide variety of data and a significant volume of data being collected every second. The velocity and quality of data are increasing every minute. Big data can be… Read More
October 15, 2020 Speedier Interactions with Actian Zen from Node.js Make faster calls using the high-speed Btrieve 2 API Developers building real-time, data-intensive Edge applications are increasingly turning to Node.js. It’s not in itself a programming language but an open-source, multi-platform, run-time environment that leverages JavaScript and its ecosystem — and turns out to be quite well suited for today’s data streaming and JSON… Read More
October 9, 2020 What is a modern data platform? What is a modern data platform? When we ask this question, we get two different groups of answers. The first group is around the technology needed for data processing in today's business environment. In this group, the answers mention things like cloud services, containers, and on-prem. The second set of answers involves sources of… 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
July 2, 2020 SQLite: Not Faster, Not Better, But Cheaper? Understanding SQLite’s Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) Over the past three months this blog series has explored why developers gravitated toward SQLite for embedded data management. Some developers chose SQLite because members of the extended team knew SQL and wanted to leverage that knowledge to support data management or the extraction of data for… 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
June 11, 2020 SQLite’s Serverless Architecture Doesn’t Serve IoT Environments Well Part Two Part Two: Rethinking What Client-Server Means for Edge Data Management Over the past few weeks our SQLite Blog series has considered the performance deficiencies of SQLite when handling local persistent data and looked at the performance complications created by the need for ETL when sharing SQLite data with back-end databases. In our last installment—Mobile… Read More
June 11, 2020 SQLite’s Serverless Architecture Doesn’t Serve IoT Environments Well Part One Part One: Mobile may be IoT—but, when it comes to data, IoT is not Mobile Three weeks ago, we looked at the raw performance—or the lack thereof—of SQLite. After that, we looked at SQLite within the broader context of Modern Edge Data Management and discovered that its performance shortcomings were in fact compounded by… 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
April 29, 2020 SQLite – the Banana Slug of Embedded Databases 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… Read More
April 7, 2020 Making the Transition from Flat Files to SQLite – pluses, but what’s missing against requirements? 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… Read More
February 24, 2020 Robotic Process Automation is Hot – Integration is Not! Robotic process automation (or RPA for short) is the term used to describe the next generation of technology-enabled workflow management capabilities. RPA solutions come in various sizes and shapes from a myriad of different vendors. RPA is the current buzzword and has enormous growth opportunity but integration is complex and requires expensive skills and… Read More
January 23, 2020 Visualizing Social Relationships Using Object Databases Social relationships hold a wealth of information about your customers, employees, and suppliers that (if you have the tools to harness them) can provide you valuable insights about the factors that influence behaviors that ultimately impact your bottom line. The challenge with analyzing and visualizing social relationships is that the underlying data doesn't match… Read More
January 16, 2020 Layman’s Guide to Machine Learning and Customer Data Privacy It feels like only yesterday that “Machine Learning” and “Artificial Intelligence” were equated with science fiction by most regular folks outside of tech. As a movie-going culture, we have a long history of associating these concepts with self-aware robots or rogue computer programs that could escape the laboratories where they were created and threaten all humanity. But in 2020, ML and AI have been considerably demystified. And yet, even if it seems less… Read More
November 25, 2019 It’s Back to the Future for Flat Files … Part Three Why embedded software application developers should dump flat files before they have to run dump on them I wrote an initial blog a few weeks ago on flat files and why embedded software application developers readily adopted them. Then in the next blog, I covered why embedded developers are reluctant to use databases. In… Read More
November 13, 2019 Chat with us! Learn about the new way to engage Support Services at Actian We are delighted to introduce the “Live Chat” feature, which was embedded in “Actian Communities” on November 11, 2019. It is a complete chat solution that enables instant chat support with Actian subject matter experts. Each chat request will be directed to 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
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 3, 2019 Your Dreams Are Our Dreams I recently had the privilege of presenting at Insight Technology’s db tech showcase in Tokyo. The night before my presentation my colleagues and I had been invited to a meal with one of our partners. At the end of the meal, one of my colleagues was thanking our hosts for a wonderful meal and… Read More
September 3, 2019 Actian Datacast: Is Your Enterprise Fully Maximizing the Value of its Available Data? Last week, we announced the findings of the Actian Datacast 2019: Hybrid Data Trends Snapshot, a survey of 303 IT professionals with influence or decision-making ability at their companies of 250+ employees which found that more than half of enterprises today are unable to efficiently manage nor effectively use data to drive decision-making, among… Read More
August 29, 2019 Start Learning Zen v14 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… 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
July 16, 2019 How to Address Integration Challenges with the Proliferation of IoT Devices During the past few years, IoT devices have evolved from being a consumer novelty to a core part of next-generation IT ecosystems for businesses of all sizes. IoT devices (such as smart watches, fitbits, home sensors, RFID point of sale scanners, heartbeat monitors, etc) have become attractive and useful because of their inexpensive price… Read More
July 11, 2019 Will Data Management in Operational Technology Finally Be Standardized? 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… Read More
June 13, 2019 Delivering the Right Data to the Right User in the Right Format is the Key to Success for Data Architects, Engineers, and DBAs The data consumers within your organization aren’t a homogeneous group, so you must adapt your data management solutions accordingly. At one end of the spectrum is the ideal, “one-size-fits-all” solution. At the other end is a customized set of capabilities for each individual user that seems ideal, but is unworkable. How then do you… Read More
June 11, 2019 Democratization of Data Means Making Data Usable for Users of Varied Skill Levels and Charters If you’re a data engineer or a data architect, then you’re probably kept awake at night wondering how to design your data integration, management and analytics support platforms, so your DBAs and IT Ops colleagues can easily manage them while a varied set of data users are able to consume them simultaneously. These users… 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
February 21, 2019 Retail Kiosk Fail. How IoT instrumentation could have averted my purchase being MIA at MIA. Last week, I was returning from our Actian 2019 Sales Kickoff. I’d already spent considerable time trying to get a USB-C 65-Watt charger for my Lenovo laptop from Amazon to my hotel, which ultimately failed so I was faced with a very long unproductive day with a dead laptop battery. I was wondering by… Read More
December 19, 2018 Worried about SQLite security vulnerabilities? Keep calm and stay safe. Face the inevitable: Local persistent data at the Edge will happen It’s indisputable that Edge Intelligence will grow, whether that’s mobile applications running on Smartphones, IoT applications running in Smart Cars (or the underlying sensors), in the entertainment center, navigation systems, etc. There will be countless mobile and IoT – taken as a whole,… 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
May 1, 2018 Deploying Actian OpenROAD Applications with Loadnrun One of the main challenges for an application developer is the deployment of applications. There are many ways this is handled, from using traditional installers to web-based deployments. The initial web deployment option for OpenROAD, Actian's rapid application development and flexible deployment solution, was the eClient where the application itself was hosted on a web… 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 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 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 17, 2018 Simplifying Development with OpenROAD JSON-RPC With the release of the new patches at the end of December for version 6.2, Actian OpenROAD (our rapid application development and flexible deployment solution) is providing a new functionality in the form of JSON support and JSON-RPC support for OpenROAD Server. Those familiar with OpenROAD would know that an application server was available from version… 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
July 1, 2022 Is Big Data Useful to Anyone? Does it Have Intrinsic Value? 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… Read More
June 21, 2022 Cloud Economics – The Advantage of Moving Your Data to the Cloud (TCO) 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… Read More
May 23, 2022 The Customer Journey and the Role of Data A typical buyer’s journey moves through distinct phases starting with Awareness, continuing on to Consideration, Purchase, and Onboarding/Post-Purchase, and hopefully ending in Advocacy. Much of the journey is carried out digitally – up to 67%, according to some estimates. Data breadcrumbs are left behind along a digital path, as people search online, sign up… Read More
April 15, 2022 Data Profiling and Data Quality: What You Need to Know Data is the lifeblood of business: it drives decision making, allows for analysis and prediction, and can help drive revenue. But data can also be its own worst enemy: it can lead to analysis paralysis, lead to inaccurate predictions, and even make processes more bureaucratic. That’s where data profiling and data quality come in.… Read More
January 31, 2022 What’s an Edge Data Fabric? What’s a Data Fabric? A data fabric is a data architecture, management practices, and policies to deliver a set of data services that span all these domains and endpoints. Data fabrics provide that framework. They essentially serve as both the translator and the plumbing for data in all its forms, wherever it sits and… Read More
January 28, 2021 From Data Management to Decision Making for Empowerment 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… Read More
January 18, 2023 Embracing Customer Profiling and Data Management Defining Exceptional Service Organizations always aim to give their customers the best experiences. There are several interpretations of what constitutes good and excellent service, and sometimes these terms are used interchangeably. However, many companies fail at achieving exceptional service because they do not understand their customers. Delivering any level of service requires that we… Read More
May 18, 2020 SQLite Equals ETL Heavy Two weeks ago, I likened the performance of SQLite to that of a Banana Slug. Now, some may consider that a bit of hyperbole (and some UC Santa Cruz alumni may feel that I impugned the good name of their mascot, which was not my intent) but the numbers don’t lie. The measurable difference… 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
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
July 8, 2019 Are You Collecting the Right Data Sources? Quantity as well as quality are so important to your data, but there is a third dimension to your data puzzle that is even more important – content. As your company evaluates new data sources and improvements to your existing data, ask yourself, “Are we collecting the right data?” Here are three tips to… Read More
May 4, 2018 A moment of Zen for your resting IoT data on its journey to data nirvana 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… Read More
December 12, 2017 Connecting to Actian X (Ingres) with PHP and NGINX Not long ago I spoke at the Actian Hybrid Data Conference in London about connecting Actian X (Ingres), Actian's combination of industry-leading transactional and high-speed analytic databases, to the Web. Here we present how to use a very popular web server (reverse proxy, load balancing, etc...) on Linux, NGINX, to do just that. Here's how… 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
