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
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 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
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 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 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 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
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 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
