Category: Actian

Feed: Actian. Author: Lewis Carr. As businesses work to reopen and students return, in-person, to schools nationwide, track and trace is a critical component to mitigate potential resurgences in COVID-19 cases. The more densely populated a city, the harder track and trace will be. However, getting urban and suburban areas moving again is critical to jumpstarting the US economy.Track and trace is a tall order for several reasons, including public resistance – from wearing masks to social distancing – to allowing third-party surveillance of location and identity through mobile devices. Furthermore, the question of how to prioritize where track and ... Read More

Feed: Actian. Author: Pradeep Bhanot. Abraham Lincoln is quoted as saying, “If I had 8 hours to chop down a tree, I would spend 6 sharpening my axe.”  Spending 75% of the allotted time on preparation may seem like a lot, but in fact, most industry observers report that preparing data for business analysis or machine learning is indeed 70 to 80% of the time spent by data scientists and analysts.The data preparation pipeline consists of the following steps Access the data. Ingest (or Fetch) the data. Cleanse the data. Format the data. Combine the data. And finally, Analyze the ... Read More

Feed: Actian. Author: Pradeep Bhanot. The ISO 17788 Cloud Computing Overview and Vocabulary standard defines a hybrid cloud as “a cloud deployment model using at least two different cloud deployment models.”  When we talk about different deployment models, we are talking about private clouds, public clouds with multiple different cloud providers, and even legacy applications.  When the different deployment models are combined, the multi-hybrid cloud is created.  The multi-hybrid model allows businesses to optimize their operations.Competitive Advantage When a business employs a private and public cloud, they can make careful decisions regarding what applications and services are deployed to each ... Read More

Feed: Actian. Author: Raghu Chakravarthi. Today, Actian is excited to announce a partnership with Google Cloud that makes the Actian Avalanche real-time connected data platform available for preview on Google Cloud. Initially, the Avalanche preview will be available in the us-west1 and us-east1 regions. If you are interested in trying out Avalanche on Google Cloud, you can sign up for preview here.Throughout the roll-out period, organizations will be able to take advantage of the fact that Google Cloud has the best backhaul and high-bandwidth networking infrastructure of any cloud provider, ensuring lightning-fast data access even across regions. Leveraging this superior ... Read More

Feed: Actian. Author: Dahye Huh. Understanding data is an important part of running any business.  Typically, analysis is performed on data that is stored in forms, spreadsheets, and relational databases.  These are all related to what we know today as structured data.  However, constraining data with forms and tables in a modern business environment is no longer sufficient.The Evolution of Data While structured data is the most common type of business data to be analyzed, it is not the most common type of information.  Structured data represents only 5% to 10% of the information that modern businesses need to deal ... Read More

Feed: Actian. Author: Pradeep Bhanot. This may seem like an academic question, but it is increasingly becoming a reality for modern businesses. What do you do when you have millions of records with infinite width and depth, and your data warehouse chokes?  Do you trim your data?  Do you add more infrastructure capacity?  Or do you need to look at a better data warehouse solution?This problem is akin to owning an old car that makes a bunch of noises, smells terrible, and has wheels that rattle when you drive down the road.  What do you do about it?  Drive slower ... Read More

Feed: Actian. Author: Pradeep Bhanot. A few months ago, companies went into crisis mode, globally – figuring out how to respond to the COVID-19 outbreak.  Since then, most organizations have overcome the initial shock and disruption and figured out how to adapt their workforce and business processes for a remote-work environment.  When this started, the hope was that COVID-19 would be a temporary disruption and would only last a few weeks or months.  It hasn’t played out that way – with the virus evolving into a global pandemic with no vaccine in sight; companies now realize that there is a ... Read More

Feed: Actian. Author: Chris Clark. There’s now an easier way to connect to Avalanche from Tableau using the new Actian ODBC connector available in the Tableau Extension Gallery.Actian and Tableau have partnered for the past several years to deliver a seamless connectivity experience to our customers. To take advantage of Tableau’s latest analytical features, the two teams engaged in the development of an improved Tableau connector leveraging Tableau’s new Connector SDK. The benefits you will see with the new connector is support for Level of Detail (LOD) Expressions, no need for a TDC file, as well as a more streamlined ... Read More

Feed: Actian. Author: Pradeep Bhanot. When companies project data warehouse growth, they often look at a curve that mimic’s the growth of data in source systems.  This approach works if all you are concerned with is storage growth.  What is commonly overlooked is the compute growth curve for processing updates to your data.  As IT systems become more interconnected, data updates in one place have a ripple effect as they are replicated elsewhere.  Your data warehouse then receives updates from all impacted data sources, not just the place where the change was initiated.  If the compute growth isn’t planned for ... Read More

Feed: Actian. Author: Pradeep Bhanot. Enterprise Data Integration is the merging of data across two or more organizations.  This scenario is most commonly found when companies are going through mergers or acquisitions, and data from the two companies need to be brought together.  Other scenarios for Enterprise Data Integration are joint-partnerships (where two or more companies work together under the umbrella of a shared business entity) and integration across different business units with an enterprise conglomerate. In any of these scenarios, effective enterprise data integration requires a combination of organizational politics, effective data architecture, and scalable data integration techniques.This is ... Read More