Schnelligkeit zählt bei der Datenanalyse

Why Performance Matters

My very first sales call to an analytics prospect was with a customer using an OLTP database for reporting. Some of their reports took hours to run and one particularly challenging report typically ran for more than thirteen hours. Our performance benchmarking had shown that for analytics workloads, Actian would be up to 100 times faster than an OLTP database and I was anxious to see if that would hold true in the real world. Indeed, we were able to take the 13-hour report and complete it in less than twenty seconds.

It felt like a punch to the gut when the customer informed us that speed did not matter to him because that particular report was run on Saturday nights and so long as it was completed by Monday at 9 am, it didn’t matter how long it took to run. That is when I first realized that for performance to really matter, it has to deliver business value.

For this prospect, that weekly report was parceled out to a team of representatives who spent their week working off aging information and wasting time visiting accounts where the status had changed. By taking advantage of the performance that Actian could deliver and switching to real-time access to their customer information, they were able to eliminate wasted customer visits and grow revenue by 12% in the first year after adopting Actian.

Fast forward to today, data sets are exponentially more extensive, and many industries are reliant on fast analytics performance to achieve improvements in business outcomes, remain competitive, and add value to their customers. Here are a few examples of how Actian’s continued performance gains help its clients improve their data analytics capabilities.

Performance Matters in Healthcare

Equian uses Actian for healthcare claims processing because it enables them to process claims much faster than any other technology they have evaluated. Equian is paid a fee for each claim they process, and the more claims they process, the more money they make. The fees they receive for processing claims are dependent on the age of the claim, so this is a prime example of an instance where Actian’s performance delivers directly to the bottom line. But it isn’t always so obvious.

Performance Matters for Insurance Providers

Die größte britische Kfz-Organisation, The AA, nutzt die ActianTechnologie, um schnell genaue Kfz-Versicherungsangebote zu erstellen. Sie stellen Angebote für Websites mit Kfz-Versicherungsvergleichen bereit, und je schneller sie ein Angebot erstellen können, desto prominenter werden sie auf der Seite mit den Konkurrenzangeboten platziert. Die schnelle Erstellung eines Angebots ist natürlich wichtig, aber die Erstellung eines genauen Angebots, das mit unzähligen anderen Datenquellen angereichert ist, ist für die Versicherungsvertreter ebenso wichtig - sie müssen sicher sein, dass das Angebot das versicherbare Risiko genau wiedergibt. Wenn zum Beispiel das Auto, für das Sie einen Kostenvoranschlag anfordern, in eine Reihe von Unfällen verwickelt war, muss dies in den Kostenvoranschlag einfließen, ebenso wie das Fahrverhalten des Fahrers und die demografischen Daten des Viertels, in dem das Auto geparkt werden soll.

Performance Matters in Financial Services

In der Welt der Finanzdienstleistungen ist Zeit Geld; eine Millisekunde Zeitersparnis bei der Analyse von Daten kann Millionengewinne oder -verluste bedeuten. Refinitiv, jetzt Teil der Londoner Börse, baute seine Eikon-Analyseplattform auf ActianTechnologie auf und setzte eine SLA von 20 ms für die Ausführung von Analyseabfragen fest. Die Analyseplattform von Refinitiv stellt ihren Kunden die Daten und Analysen zur Verfügung, die sie benötigen, um Handelsentscheidungen schneller als die Kunden ihrer Wettbewerber zu treffen. Auf den sich schnell verändernden Finanzmärkten ist Zeit Geld. Daher legen die Menschen enormen Wert auf einen Leistungsvorsprung.

Performance You Can Try for Yourself

The recently released GigaOm Cloud Data Warehouse benchmark report clearly demonstrates the Actian Data Platform, formerly Avalanche, performance superiority over the competition with a typical decision support workload comprised of a mix of complex queries, representative of the types of queries we encounter in every customer, no matter what industry they are in.

Scalable to Meet Your Performance Demands

While many of our competitors charge a premium for the type of performance that Actian Data Platform delivers, we pride ourselves on the value our platform delivers.   Not only do we deliver the best value per query, but we also keep your costs low by enabling you to scale the compute environment to meet your ever-changing business needs. Additionally, we identify when the system has been inactive for a specified period and will shut it down to stop the meter from running. Gone are the days of purchasing systems to match your peak workload and hoping that your gut feeling regarding anticipated growth was accurate. You can grow and shrink your Actian Data Platform environment to meet the needs of the business.

I’m very proud of the technology that my team has built and of the results that the researchers at GigaOm were able to achieve when benchmarking Actian Data Platform relative to our competitors. I’d love to hear your stories of how performance translated into business value for you.

About Emma McGrattan

Emma McGrattan is CTO at Actian, leading global R&D in high-performance analytics, data management, and integration. With over two decades at Actian, Emma holds multiple patents in data technologies and has been instrumental in driving innovation for mission-critical applications. She is a recognized authority, frequently speaking at industry conferences like Strata Data, and she's published technical papers on modern analytics. In her Actian blog posts, Emma tackles performance optimization, hybrid cloud architectures, and advanced analytics strategies. Explore her top articles to unlock data-driven success.