Moving Your Data To The Cloud? Read These Helpful Tips.
  • 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…

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Data Integration: The Connective Tissue Of Business
  • 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…

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What’s New In Actian DataFlow Version 6.6.1?
  • 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,…

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The Top 5 Pitfalls Of Traditional Data Warehouses
  • 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…

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Actian DataConnect V11.3 Released
  • 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,…

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Actian Vector Data Ingestion
  • 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,…

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New Improvements To Security And Performance In Actian Vector
  • 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.…

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Vector Enterprise Edition Now Available On AWS Marketplace
  • 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…

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Deploying Actian OpenROAD Applications With Loadnrun
  • 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…

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How Actian Vector Helps You Eliminate OLAP Cubes
  • 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…

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Ingres (Actian X) Disaster Recovery
  • 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…

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Actian’s March Topcoder Challenges
  • 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,…

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Actian Vector – Community Edition Launches On Azure Marketplace
  • 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…

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Jolt Your Performance With Actian In Detroit And Cambridge This Week
  • 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…

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Making Actian Zen Btrieve API Code More Efficient
  • 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…

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Automatically Synchronize Your OLTP And OLAP Tables In Actian X (Ingres 11)
  • 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…

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Python And Btrieve 2 On Windows: Accessing Actian Zen Data With No SQL
  • 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…

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Simplifying Development With OpenROAD JSON-RPC
  • 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…

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When BIG Data Doesn’t Have To Be
  • 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…

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Fast. Faster. Fastest.
  • 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…

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How I Analyzed 165 Million Flight Records In Seconds On My Laptop
  • 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…

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Insight To Insights
  • 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…

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Reusable Templates And Macros For Actian’s Hybrid Integration Manager
  • 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…

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The X-Vector
  • 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…

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Delivering Real-Time Reporting At Speed And Scale
  • 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…

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Vector In Hadoop 5.0 – New Features You Should Care About
  • 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…

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Can Your Applications Find You?
  • 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…

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DataConnect 11.1 Highlights
  • 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…

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Four Tips To Accelerate Your ServiceNow Integration Using Actian PointConnect
  • 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…

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Predictions For The Hybrid Data Landscape
  • 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.…

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Connecting ServiceNow To Other Applications’ Data Doesn’t Have To Be Difficult
  • 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…

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HTAP At Actian: The Best Of Both Worlds In Data Management
  • 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…

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Hybrid Data Is A Gamechanger
  • 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…

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Hadoop Short Circuit Reads And Database Performance
  • 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…

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Performance Troubleshooting Tips For Actian Vector In Hadoop
  • 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…

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Accelerating Spark With Actian Vector In Hadoop
  • 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…

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  • 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…

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Taking Advantage Of Ordered Data
  • 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.…

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  • 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…

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Analytics Cube And Beyond
  • 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…

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