In-memory columnar SQL database with Actian Vector
High-performance vectorized columnar analytic database.
What is Actian Vector?
Actian Vector is a relational database engine designed for high-performance analytics. Actian Vector was designed from the ground up to exploit performance features in today’s x86 CPUs such as vectorization and larger chip caches enabling in-chip analytics. Actian Vector’s record-breaking speed delivers results faster than any of its competitors.
Fast
Consistent performance leader on TPC-H decision support benchmark over last 5 years.
Open
Industry-standard ANSI SQL:2003 support plus integration for extensive set of data formats.
Enterprise-grade
Updates, security, management, replication.
High-performance vectorized columnar
analytic database
Built for speed
Actian Vector is designed for speed and efficiency using column-based storage and vector processing to deliver record-breaking in-chip analytics.
Built for open
Actian Vector enables broad access using open standards and provides extensibility through open source technologies like Spark and Hadoop.
Built for the enterprise
Actian Vector delivers a unique combination of cutting edge innovation and mature database features that are proven in the enterprise.
Performance
Vector has a history of delivering record breaking performance, showing a significant lead over other databases and query engines that are just starting to move in this architectural direction:
Here are some examples of what our customers can do:
Watch the video
The Vector engine is extremely performant. We have queries that run 20-50 times faster than running direct to the source data”
Features
Vectorized query execution
- Exploits Single Instruction, Multiple Data (SIMD) support in x86 CPUs.
- Processes hundreds or thousands of elements without the overhead traditional databases have.
Maximizing CPU cache for execution
- Uses private CPU core and caches as execution memory – 100x faster than RAM.
- Delivers significantly greater throughput without limitations of in-memory approaches.
Other CPU optimizations
Supports hardware-accelerated string-based operations, benefiting selections on strings using wild card matching, aggregations on string- based values, and joins or sorts using string keys.
Column-based storage
- Reduces I/O to relevant columns.
- Opportunity for better data compression.
- Built-in storage indexes maximize efficiency.
Data compression
- Multiple options to maximize compression: Run Length Encoding (RLE), Patched Frame of Reference (PFOR), delta encoding on top of PFOR, dictionary encoding, and LZ4: for different string values.
- 4-6x compression ratios common for real-world data.
Positional Delta Trees (PDTs)
- Full ACID compliance with multi-version read consistency.
- Changes are always written persistently to a transaction log before a commit completes to ensure full recoverability.
- High-performance in-memory Positional Delta Trees (PDTs) handle incremental small inserts, updates, and deletes without impacting query performance.
Easy data migration
Move a database to a cloud or remote datacenter in one step using the integrated “clonedb” function (two steps if you include installing Vector on the remote server).
Storage indexes
- Automatic min-max indices enable block skipping on reads.
- Eliminates the need for explicit data partitioning strategy.
Parallel execution
Flexible adaptive parallel execution algorithms to maximize concurrency while enabling load prioritization.
Use cases
Customer profile
Granular, multi-channel, near real-time customer profile analytics can tell you about your customers, the best means to connect, the targeted offers that will resonate, their predilection to churn, and the best ways to personalize the entire customer experience to win more business and drive up loyalty levels.
To gain a more complete and accurate profile, mine all avenues of information, in any format, from any location or channel, structured or unstructured, from an endlessly growing number of sources, such as sales transactions, Web, social, mobile, purchase history, service history, and much more.
Examine the totality of your company’s customer data to identify, attract, and retain the most profitable ones. Once you have embraced data from all channels and sources, employ advanced data modeling to de-duplicate, identify common characteristics, and create customer clusters that provides a comprehensive, singular portrait of your customer’s purchasing habits.
Micro-segmentation
Most companies doing segmentation use basic account information and demographics to find groups of customers based on high-level account and behavior metrics. Historical information often is so voluminous, companies are forced to work with samples. With Actian, you can connect to and mine all of your data, including big data sources, to get a detailed, holistic view of the customer.
Uncovering relationships between customers and key purchase drivers and predicting the value of each customer along thousands of customer attributes, you can uncover new segments that your competition isn’t thinking about yet, increasing conversions and gaining higher returns on your marketing investment.
Create a better customer experience with targeted offers, appropriate responses, and effective dialogue. True customer engagement that is built on a deep understanding of specific needs and wants leads to more satisfied customers and longer lasting relationships, increasing revenue and wallet share for your business.
Customer lifetime value
Measure and maximize current and forecasted customer value across a number of products, segments, and time periods to design new programs that accentuate your best customers and provide you with a distinct business advantage.
Connect to all of your data, from account histories and demographics to mobile and social media interactions, and blend these disparate sources with speed and accuracy. Uncover key purchase drivers to understand why someone purchases or rejects your products. Assign customer value scores by correlating which characteristics and behaviors lead to value at various points of time in the future.
Generally, it is more cost effective to sell to existing customers than it is to accumulate new ones. Optimize outbound marketing to give prominence to your high-value customers. Customize inbound customer touch centers by arming call centers with highly personalized customer scores. Increase customer lifetime values cost effectively with individual precision, improving both loyalty and profitability.
Next best action
Maximize long-term customer value by not only predicting what a customer will do next, but influencing that action as well.
If you want specifics about customer behavior and spend, you need all data available to you, structured or unstructured, from traditional enterprise sources, social networks, customer service interactions, Web click streams, and any other touch points that may occur. Actian allows you to connect to all of your data to build complete customer profiles, regardless of format or location, which feed into your data science models.
Use micro-segmentation models to find and classify small clusters of similar customers. Customer value models predict the value of each customer to the business at various intervals. Combining the output of these two models into a personalized recommendation engine gives you the information you need to take action that gives you a distinct competitive advantage. You can optimize your supply chain, customize campaigns with confidence, and ultimately drive meaningful, personalized engagements.
Campaign optimization
Stand out in a crowded market and capture more wallet share using Actian to deploy effective, innovative, highly personalized campaigns through deep analysis.
Traditional campaign optimization models use limited samples of transactional data, which can lead to incomplete customer views. Actian allows you to connect to social media and competitor web sites in real time to learn which competitive offerings are gaining traction in the marketplace. Web purchasing patterns and call center text logs stored on Hadoop provide valuable insight into customer interactions. Marketing and campaign data ensure any recommended actions comply with company goals, rules, and regulations.
Actian helps you build, test, and deploy campaigns with rapid succession. Quickly learn when to make adjustments and adapt to changes in the market or your customer base. With your customer scores and optimized lists in hand, you can design innovative campaigns that allow you to create and sustain a competitive advantage.
Churn analysis
Churn prediction models have been limited to account information and transactional history, a tiny fraction of available data. With Actian, increase the accuracy of churn predictions by combining and analyzing traditional transactional and account datasets with call center text logs, past marketing and campaign response data, competitive offers, social media, and a host of other data sources.
Discover customer classifications and assign customer lifetime and churn scores to understand which customers you can’t afford to lose. Generate raw churn predictions informed by individual customer profitability. Use the insights gained to transform the customer experience without spending more than necessary.
With Actian, share personalized recommendations with customer representatives, outbound marketing campaigns, and product and service supply planners. Create programs to retain your high-value customers and offload less profitable segments. As a result, you can boost average revenue per customer, improve customer satisfaction and loyalty, optimize supply chains, accurately price products, and plan for new releases.
Market basket analysis
Uncover your most profitable product groupings, learn which products benefit most from associations with other products, know optimal shelf arrangements, and better target marketing and promotions—all to increase retail revenue.
Market basket analysis models are typically limited to a small sample of historical receipt data, aggregated to a level where potential impact and insights are lost. With Actian, bring in additional sources, in varying formats, enabling discovery of critical patterns, at any product level, to create a competitive advantage.
Actian enables data science models and advanced analytics to go deeper into detailed associations on all product relationships, and segment customers and spending habits into similar groups to learn more about shoppers.
With detailed shopper segmentation and market basket analysis results, create a shelf optimization plan that identifies your highest performing product groups. Discovering buying patterns can lead to targeted promotions with greater impact on the customer experience to increase business value.
Accelerate analytic workflows with Actian DataFlow
Actian DataFlow eliminates performance bottlenecks in your data-intensive applications by delivering a comprehensive set of ETL and data quality capabilities for end-to-end data access, transformation, preparation, and predictive analysis. It complements Actian Vector with a graphical interface to manage data workflows, orchestrating analytic functions and maximizing parallel work streams for faster execution.
- Easy to implement – No complex parallel processing issues; visual and API level interfaces.
- Scalable – Performance dynamically scales with increased core counts and increased nodes.
- High throughput – Fast, deep analysis of large data sets with no limit on input data size.
- Extensible technology – Customize the platform so you can remain in control of development.
- Cost efficient – Maximum performance from commodity multi-core SMP servers and clusters.