Category: Actian

Feed: Actian. Author: Traci Curran. Hybrid cloud adoption is on the rise. As companies look to accelerate their cloud journey, it’s becoming clear that there are numerous values – and constraints –  when blending the use of private on-premise clouds with those of public off-premise clouds. Creating a strategic balance between the two can often yield more favorable results for the business, but it’s important to carefully consider the benefits and risks associated with data that moves between public and private infrastructures.What is a Hybrid Cloud? A hybrid cloud environment or architecture combines using a public cloud and a private ... Read More

Feed: Actian. Author: Traci Curran. The topic of data integration has been around forever. Before we used technology to manage data, we integrated data in manual ways. At the time, we needed to integrate simple data structures such as customer data with purchase data. As the industry progressed, we have gone from managing flat data files and integrations to using applications to creating databases and data warehouses that automates the integration of data. The early data sources were few compared to today, with information technology supporting almost everything that we do. Data is everywhere and captured in many formats. Managing ... Read More

Feed: Actian. Author: Traci Curran. For many years, all your services, products, or just the way you worked within your organization that required technology was in data centers that you owned and managed. Over time, the storage devices and servers filled these centers, as virtualization became prevalent in 2000 via VMWare. IT realized they could build basic models of servers and storage as code anyone could use. Operations and developers could create code to assemble applications and the associated infrastructure as code (IaaS and PaaS). The availability of cost-effective and secure cloud services has facilitated the delivery of software code-based ... Read More

Feed: Actian. Author: Traci Curran. Data is everywhere. In any organization, you will find data in multiple applications, databases, data warehouses, and in many cases, public and private clouds. Usually, data does not belong to a specific group within an organization and is often shared across teams and applications.Similar to a professional sports team, each function in the organization should have a specific role, sharing data and information in real-time to support better outcomes. In order to efficiently share data, businesses need to focus on integrating their data in an automated and timely manner. This can be a challenge when ... Read More

Feed: Actian. Author: Dahye Huh. Semi-structured data is emerging as a critical element of business operations and strategies. Typically, business leaders make decisions based on analysis of data stored in forms, spreadsheets, and relational databases – in other words, structured data. However, in a modern business environment, constraining data with forms and tables is no longer sufficient.What is semi-structured 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 with ... Read More

Feed: Actian. Author: Pradeep Bhanot. The previous blogs in this series discussed the top 5 pitfalls of traditional operational data warehouses and defined the Operational Data Warehouse (ODW) as a potential solution.  Below is a list of my Top 10 desirable benefits of an effective ODW:Current. Continuous data updates via “micro-batches” or streamed singleton updates throughout the day provide the most current information for analytics-based decision-making. Fast. Changes to ODW data need to be made with the lowest performance penalty. Columnar data blocks that maintain their min-max value metadata eliminate the overhead of creating indexes that need to be updated ... Read More

Feed: Actian. Author: Pradeep Bhanot. Abraham Lincoln might easily have been discussing data preparation steps for analytics when he said, “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 data preparation steps for business analysis or machine learning consume 70 to 80% of the time spent by data scientists and analysts.Data Preparation Steps in Detail The data preparation pipeline consists of the following steps Access the data. Ingest (or fetch) the ... Read More

Feed: Actian. Author: Teresa Wingfield. Part 2: Cloud Service SecurityIn my previous post on modern data warehouse security, we looked at issues related to database security. This post will focus on the separate, but related issue of cloud service security, which is increasingly important since nearly half of all data warehouses are hosted in the cloud.[1] The economics of the cloud, the agility with which you can build out and modify services, and the potential to scale almost infinitely continue to accelerate the adoption of cloud data warehouses. As I did in my database security post, I’ll run through some ... Read More

Feed: Actian. Author: Teresa Wingfield. Database Security: Part 1Did you know that security breaches involving the cloud now surpass breaches involving on-premise infrastructure? According to the Verizon 2021 Data Breach Investigation Report, 73% of cybersecurity incidents involved external cloud assets—compared with 27% only one year ago.[1] Having just joined Actian from a cloud security provider, even I was surprised by this tremendous surge. This new insight has motivated me to review the security requirements for a modern cloud data warehouse. The topic turns out to be broad, so I’m writing this blog in two parts: part 1 focuses on database ... Read More

Feed: Actian. Author: Lewis Carr. Payers, health plans, and integrated health systems run on data. Integration, processing, and analytics are integral to their business process and managing of costs and risk. The role of payers in the healthcare industry has been expanding for years. As care models have shifted from fee-for-service to coordinated and value-based care, payers and providers alike have been generating—and relying upon—more and more data to run operations smoothly. This evolution had been underway for some time, but the Covid-19 pandemic abruptly put new pressure into the system, heightening the need and requirements for better interoperability and ... Read More