April 1, 2019 Moving Your Data to the Cloud? Read These Helpful Tips. When you talk to IT professionals about cloud migration, the conversation is likely to gravitate towards migration of applications from on-premises infrastructure to public and/or private cloud environments. The application-centric perspective is understandable as applications are often the visible interface between business users and the technology platforms they leverage. What many IT practitioners forget… Read More
December 7, 2018 Data Integration: The Connective Tissue of Business People, products, processes and systems may come and go, but, regardless, of the structural components of your business, data is the one thing that brings all the pieces together, so you can perform as a cohesive unit. There is no question modern businesses are evolving quickly. Market opportunities are short-lived, technology advancements are happening… Read More
November 26, 2018 What’s new in Actian DataFlow version 6.6.1? Actian DataFlow is a parallel workflow platform for end-to-end data access, transformation, preparation, and predictive analysis that eliminates performance bottlenecks in your data-intensive applications. Complementary to the Actian Vector analytic database, DataFlow leverages concurrency, parallelism and pipelining to accelerate data movement between locations in your data architecture, creating faster results. DataFlow eliminates memory constraints,… Read More
October 11, 2018 The Top 5 Pitfalls of Traditional Data Warehouses Over the past two decades, data warehouse solutions have evolved and diverged to address a myriad of use cases. Meanwhile, the pace of business continues to accelerate, making it harder to remain competitive. These new demands can stretch the abilities of traditional data warehouses. Below are 5 of the common pitfalls that can trip… Read More
August 3, 2018 Actian DataConnect v11.3 Released 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,… 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
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
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 15, 2018 Upgrading to Actian DataConnect Version 9 to Version 11: A Better Journey About a year ago I wrote an article discussing upgrading from Actian DataConnect Version 9 to Version 10 (Actian DataConnect – The Conversion from v9 to v10 does not have to be scary!!) That article used the v9 or v10 Process object to use a script step to do the magic, with code that… Read More
March 12, 2018 Jolt Your Performance with Actian in Detroit and Cambridge This Week 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… 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 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 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
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 3, 2017 Reusable templates and macros for Actian’s Hybrid Integration Manager It's a pretty exciting time to be a User Experience Designer here at Actian! We are working on some great new features for Hybrid Integration Manager and I wanted to share with you two features that really promote reusability. Reusability is a reoccurring theme that we have heard from you, our customers, that we… 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
September 19, 2017 Vector in Hadoop 5.0 – New Features You Should Care About Today we announce the introduction of the next release of Actian Vector in Hadoop, extending our support of Apache Spark to include direct access to native Hadoop file formats and tighter integration with Spark SQL and Spark R applications. In this release, we also incorporate performance improvements, integration with Hadoop security frameworks, and administrative… 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
July 19, 2017 DataConnect 11.1 Highlights I am excited to share news of our most recent release of DataConnect 11.1. This release wraps up a significant phase in that it provides backwards compatible support for our customers who use EDI x12, HIPAA, and HL7 connectors and components. If you use Data Integrator version 9 to process those documents, you can… Read More
June 20, 2017 Four Tips to Accelerate your ServiceNow integration using Actian PointConnect Deploying new applications is a fact of life in business. But oftentimes, a seemingly simple integration can quickly become more complex and costly than anticipated. If you are one of the thousands of organizations planning to use, or already using, ServiceNow, you’ll want to keep in mind a few things to make your investment… 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
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
October 12, 2016 Knowing who is who in the zoo is more important than what systems are out there to connect to Back when I started off in the industry, some 20 something years ago (I do pretend I am still in my 20s so that number has a nice ring to it) there was only one IT Department with one manager in most large organizations. Now there are multiple managers within different departments, some aligned… Read More
August 2, 2016 Hadoop Short Circuit Reads and Database Performance If you've been working with Hadoop then you've likely come across the concept of Short Circuit Reads (SCRs) and how they can aid performance. These days they are mostly enabled by default (although not in "vanilla" Apache or close derivatives like Amazon EMR). Actian VectorH brings high performance SQL, ACID compliance, and enterprise security… 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 9, 2016 Accelerating Spark with Actian Vector in Hadoop One of the hottest projects in the Apache Hadoop community is Spark, and we at Actian are pleased to announce a Spark-Vector connector for the Actian Vector in Hadoop platform (VectorH) that links the two together. VectorH provides the fastest and most complete SQL in Hadoop solution, and connecting to Spark opens up interfaces… 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
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
April 14, 2016 Analytics Cube and Beyond Big Data engineering has invented a seemingly endless supply of workaround solutions. These are for both scalability and performance problems. Ultimately, our approach to solving these problems dictates how sustainable they will be. This post compares some modern best practices with pre-processing cube environments. 3 Ways A Hadoop Database Competes With Cube Analytics Software… Read More
