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…
Doug Inkster is an Actian Fellow with a long history in the database market, starting with IDMS in the 1970’s and moving to Ingres in the 1990’s. We asked him to reminisce about the most exciting times in his long career. Here are some of his thoughts: In my 40+ years of working with…
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,…
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…
The largest cloud computing conference of 2017 is now here in AWS re:Invent and it’s taking over Las Vegas in a big way. An estimated 40,000 engineers, product leads, marketers, technical architects, and expert users from around the world will be descending on The Strip, attending keynotes, bootcamps, demos, hackathons, and in-depth hands-on training…
We’re pleased to announce that Actian Vector 5.0 Community Edition now includes support for Mac OS X via Docker. Over the last few years Mac OS X has become increasingly popular with Developers, as has Docker, the virtualization platform that allows you to bundle applications along with their native OS and run them in…
I’m excited to announce that Actian Vector - Community Edition is now available on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Marketplace. The Community Edition is delivered as an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) and is compatible with the AWS 1-Click launch experience. Why is this important for you as a developer? If you are a SQL…
If you’re visiting what’s billed as the United Kingdom’s largest data and analytics events, you know that Big Data London at the Olympia promises to be a massive gathering of experts and analysts across the fields of Big Data, machine learning, AI, cloud technologies, and more. You’ll be able to learn from numerous pioneers…
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…
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…
Last week, Actian introduced the the new Ingres - Actian X Hybrid Database, combining the industry-leading Ingres RBMS with the record breaking analytic database Vector. With column-based storage, vector processing, multi-core parallelism (and more), Actian X puts amazing performance in the hands of Ingres developers. We've also bundled two other really big features: 1)…
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…
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…
It is rare in life that one gets an opportunity to step back, take a fresh look and reset one’s mission and trajectory. For Actian, today is such a day, as we launch a new vision, a new product solution portfolio and of course, a new tag line. Got to have a new tag…
Recently I worked on a POC that required some non-standard thinking. The challenge was that the customer's use case did not only need high performance SQL analytics but also a healthy amount of ETL (Extract, Transform, and Load). More specifically, the requirement was for ELT (or even ETLT if we want to absolutely precise).…
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…