This morning, I will be addressing the General Session on the topic of “Real Time Analytics without Breaking the Bank.” I’ll look at the way businesses are using Vectorwise to create BI projects faster, and gain insight sooner while consuming fewer machine resources than traditional analytic tools. We will be exploring the benefits that can be achieved through real-time interactive reporting and data analysis without investing an arm and a leg. Come see me at 9:30am in Cyril Magnin I, II and III.

Also today, Actian’s Mark Van de Wiel will be offering his expert advice and guidance in his breakout session “Practical Tips on Big Data Monetization.” Effective harnessing of big data in a timely fashion can lead to new revenue generation opportunities and provide meaningful insights that drive operational efficiencies, resulting in exponentially higher ROI. Join this session from Actian Vectorwise and gain practical tips on how to get more out of your data and profit from the latest technology, skills and best practices. Please find Mark’ session at 2:30pm in Cyril Magnin I.

Looking forward to seeing you there.

When existing traditional relational databases lacked the capability to provide the desired query performance, Zoho was forced to undertake an evaluation process of analytical databases that offered ease-of-use, coupled with the affordability to manage big data. Zoho selected Vectorwise after an extensive search and comparison of reporting databases.

With Zoho Reports, users are able to upload data from any source, easily build insightful reports and dashboards, and share projects with colleagues online. Zoho has more than 200,000 on Zoho Reports, and these users will be able to have access to the two things essential to business success – real-time BI information and advanced collaboration and productivity tools – all in one easily-managed place.

I welcome you to take a look at Vectorwise and see the difference it can make for your customers.

Meet Vectorwise

In case you’re hearing about Vectorwise for the first time, Vectorwise is Actian’s record-breaking performance database that helps organizations take action on Big Data. Released almost two years ago, the database has made tremendous progress in helping businesses gain new insights and drive operational efficiencies. As the business world developed data solutions at a rapid pace, Vectorwise continued to amaze by achieving record-breaking performance for the TPC-H benchmark, establishing itself as an industry best in speed and affordability.

Vectorwise 2.5 – What’s New?

• Better manageability and faster performance. Vectorwise 2.5 offers faster performance while requiring less hardware than traditional databases. New features such as Predictive Buffer manager further enhance performance on concurrent queries. In-memory updates are now performed at a more granular level for faster and more efficient inserts and updates. In addition, improved Parallel Execution exploits the full potential of multiple CPU cores for faster performance on more types of queries.
• More flexibility. To further enable better manageability, Vectorwise 2.5 allows users to store data in multiple files and locations. Flexible Storage Management enables users to store data on multiple physical locations, providing more flexibility when disk space is running low, while storing more frequently used data on faster disk drives for better accessibility. Unused data can be dropped to limit storage utilization. Vectorwise 2.5 also offers better multi-lingual support with automatic transliteration that extends beyond previous character sets.
• Now bundled with Actian Director. Vectorwise 2.5 introduces new Java-based tools that offer a single management console (GUI) and new interface designed to work with current and previous Vectorwise and Ingres databases. The new Java-based tools are available for Linux and Windows, enabling the flexibility to perform common database administration tasks against multiple environments from a single console.

To learn more, please visit the Vectorwise website at: http://www.actian.com/downloads/vectorwise  

Naturally, Actian is delighted to work with Dell to establish new bests in performance (QphH) and price-performance ($/QphH) for this industry-recognized benchmark at scale factors of 100GB and 300GB on the Dell R720.

If your company has a need to take smart action on big data, take a look at Vectorwise. Visit our news section, where a number of our customers and partners have shared stories of their experience with Vectorwise including descriptions of the benefits of the performance gains and affordability of Vectorwise, and how it is the ideal data platform for companies that want to win by quickly taking smart action. Or download Vectorwise. And let us know what you think.

About the TPC-H Benchmark: TPC and the benchmark name TPC-H are registered trademarks of the Transaction Processing Performance Council. The TPC believes that comparisons of TPC-H results measured against different database sizes are misleading and discourages such comparisons.

For our customers, this means Vectorwise’s already outstanding performance will continue to blow away the competition, providing awesome insight into big data while still remaining affordable.

We have been a part of Intel’s journey from the start. With Vectorwise, we were the first company to take advantage of Intel’s advanced chip capabilities in a relational database. We’ve proven time after time in industry benchmarks and customer environments that query performance scales linearly with clock speed and core count, and that will just get better with E5 as it will enable Vectorwise to take advantage of larger vectors and more chip cache.

E5 will also let Vectorwise take full advantage of the promise of solid-state drives. It’s the first processor with enough IO bandwidth to be capable of using the full bandwidth of SSDs, so queries will run faster, performance will be better and concurrent processing will be improved.

We look forward to running on E5 processors and continuing to break records for performance and functionality. Stay tuned as we start to implement and test!

MicroStrategy is the gold standard of business intelligence software, and its annual conference is an important event in the BI world – it highlights the most pressing issues and gives attendees the power to stay in front of the latest industry trends and technologies. There are more great sessions than I can possibly attend, but a few that I’ll be sure to attend will cover managed cloud services, building transactions into mobile apps, implementing self-service BI, as well as several case studies featuring Whole Foods, Yahoo!, and Dell.

This year’s conference is a special one for Actian, as it’s the first time we’re attending as a MicroStrategy partner. Last summer, Actian and MicroStrategy started an initiative called Performance2 which combines MicroStrategy technology with Actian VectorWise, allowing companies to deploy more BI to more people by shifting data storage to the cloud, reducing costs and making BI insights accessible anytime, anywhere through any mobile device. Our joint clients have been thrilled with the offering since its inception, so I’m looking forward to hearing feedback from users while at the show.

If you’re planning to attend, I hope you’ll stop by our booth( #45) to say hello and see what we’re up to in 2012 – it will be our most exciting year yet, and we’re looking forward to seeing everyone in Miami!

Even faster: Load data and run queries faster than ever before. New fast load utility vwload helps make loading data faster and easier with direct loads into Vectorwise tables. Vectorwise’s record breaking performance is now faster and more efficient with new Partitioned Aggregate Functions that allow users to run multiple aggregations on subsets of data in a single query.

More Analytical & Data Features: Additional analytical functions make percentile and ranking queries faster and easier. New data and time features make it easier to structure queries in Vectorwise. And BI users can now perform ad hoc queries faster with Common Table Expression types, allowing temporary query views for easier analysis.

Easier to Manage:  Vectorwise is easier to use with improvements to the management of in-memory updates.

Try it for yourself. Vectorwise 2.0 is available for download here: http://www.actian.com/downloads/vectorwise.

 Leveraging presentation techniques and exploration methods originally developed for scientific and engineering visualization, companies like Tableau Software have now made visualization accessible, understandable and affordable for companies of any size.  This has enabled business users to present volumes and types of data (e.g. location based information) in compelling and meaningful ways that allow them to identify relationships not apparent using traditional BI techniques.

 At 10:30am Pacific Time on  December 6^th, Actian and Tableau will co-host a webinar called ”Breath Taking Visualization + Record Performance” to launch our partnership and introduce business users to the key concepts around data visualization. Register now for this webinar and see a live demonstration of software of which CFO Magazine said:  In terms of generating useful, multidimensional visual analysis, it’s like going from an Etch-a-Sketch to Industrial Light and Magic. Quite simply, it’s the best piece of software CFO has run across in years.

 Find out why CFO Magazine raved about Tableau Software and learn why Actian believes that data visualization is a highly complementary approach to our own concept of Action Apps. Please join me for this important and informative event!

• BI takes too long to deploy – from identifying a business need through justifying, acquiring, installing, designing, developing, testing and finally deploying a BI project is quite simply too long for most business users
• BI is too slow – the average response time on the average BI database (which, by the way, is only about 7GB *) is over 5 seconds. In these days of instant access, end-users simply don’t want to wait 5 or more seconds
• BI is too hard to put in the hands of business users – the leading tools are too hard to put into the hands of the users so BI remains a specialist discipline often within the IT organization

 These three factors mean that, despite all the claims from the major vendors, BI remains essentially an IT tool; bought, deployed, supported – and priced – like other enterprise level IT products.

 Well, it doesn’t have to be that way. As well are hearing many people gripe about the problems of BI, we also heard many people – even some business users – talk about how successful BI has been for them; how projects can be implemented quickly and easily and how fast performance can be a reality. Many of these users were running Pentaho Business Analytics with Actian’s Vectorwise database so we decided to run a webinar to discuss how BI can be fast and easy even on a limited budget. Please register here to join us on November 17 at 10:00 a.m. PST to find out more.