InBrief Philip Howard – Research Director, Information Management www..com 2300 Geng Road, Suite 150 Palo Alto, CA 94303 Actian X Tel: +1 650 587 5500

The company CREATIVITY SCALE What was originally Relational Technologies Incorporated, founded in 1980, became Corporation in 1989. It was acquired by the ASK Group in 1990 which was itself acquired by CA in 1994. Ingres was spun out of CA in 2005 and was renamed as Actian in 2011. In 2018 the company was acquired by HCL Technologies, which is a company headquartered in India but with offices around the globe. The company has more than 120,000 employees.

Actian, which will continue to operate EXECUTION TECHNOLOGY separately from HCL, markets a number of different and data integration products The image in this Mutable Quadrant is derived from 13 high level metrics, the more the image covers a section the better. as well as the OpenROAD 4GL. As far as Execution metrics relate to the company, Technology to the are concerned these include product, Creativity to both technical and business innovation and Vector (previously ) Scale covers the potential business and market impact. and Vector Cluster (previously VectorH or Vector on Hadoop), X100 query engine is derived from VectorWise. which provide in-memory As one might expect from a product with columnar processing for its pedigree, the Ingres part of this equation analytics; the Zen (previously provides ACID guarantees and support for two- PSQL and, before that, ) phase commit within transactional processing embedded database; a NoSQL environments. The X100 engine, on the other Object database (previously hand, exploits Intel’s vector instruction set (hence Versant) and Actian X, which the Vector name) to process more data elements combines the capabilities of per instruction (SIMD: single instruction, Ingres and Vector. Actian X is multiple data). It is ANSI SQL 2003 compliant and regarded as the next release maintains ACID compliance. Columnar storage of Ingres, which means that exploits compression capabilities to minimise every Ingres user – of which storage requirements. there are thousands – with an The “Query Processing” element shown in active subscription is entitled Figure 1 is aware of where data is held and directs Figure 1 – The Query Processing element to upgrade to Actian X as the queries, or parts of queries, to the appropriate next step on their upgrade data store. Synchronisation between the two path. Vector is available both on premises and in data stores is either defined through rules using the cloud, and a managed service offering running stored procedures, or you can use conventional on AWS has recently been introduced. replication technology if latency is not an issue.

What is it? How does it work? Actian X is a hybrid database that combines One notable feature of Actian X is its support what used to be known as Ingres and what was for a patented technology known as Positional previously VectorWise. It is SMP (symmetric multi- Delta Trees. The following is an extract from processing) based with parallel processing of the the original academic research paper: “our goal data based on a configurable number of CPUs. Its is that read-only queries always see the latest architecture is illustrated in Figure 1 where the database state yet are not (significantly) slowed

© Bloor 2019 Architecture Flexibility Concurrent analytics In-process analytics Criticality Performance Ease of use Scale “ Ingres has a long- established pedigree for down by the update processing. capabilities, including 3D support for R-Tree supporting mission critical To this end, we propose the indexes; and there are database health transactional environments, Positional Delta Tree (PDT), monitoring and capabilities. Also included with while VectorWise has proven high- that is designed to minimize Actian X is DataConnect for Actian X, which performance characteristics in the overhead of on-the- provides a development engine for designing and supporting analytics, so we have fly merging of differential testing integrations, plus a production engine for no question marks over the updates into (index) scans on deployment purposes. performance and capabilities of the two acting. in stale disk-based data.” In other combination ” words, this is about improved Why should you care? query performance regardless of Ingres has a long-established pedigree for whatever updates are being made, while supporting mission critical transactional preserving consistency. It is also symptomatic of environments, while VectorWise has proven Actian’s approach, in that it leverages a number of high-performance characteristics in supporting patented technologies to maximise performance. analytics, so we have no question marks over the In particular, there has been considerable performance and capabilities of the two acting academic work involved in the development of in combination. And the integration tools and Vector, which was created initially at CWI, the other functions provided by Actian are attractive. Dutch National Research Institute for Mathematics For existing Ingres users wanting to add analytic and Computer Science. As another example, capabilities to their existing environment, Actian X Actian X (the X100 engine) incorporates patented is an obvious choice. algorithms for optimising the use of memory. Non-Ingres users fall into two camps: existing users of other relational database systems and greenfield opportunities. We do not envisage that Actian is targeting the former. For greenfield environments, it is important to bear in mind that Actian X is an SMP-based system that scales up rather than scales out. It is not likely, therefore, to be cost-effective for the very largest hybrid environments where you may have hundreds of terabytes of data to process. Where that is not an issue then Actian X may well be worth consideration. If the company wants to address the extreme end of this market then it will need to extend the use of Vector within Actian X to Vector Cluster. Figure 2 – The Actian X ecosystem The Bottom Line The broader ecosystem in which Actian X If you are an existing Ingres user then Active operates is illustrated in Figure 2. Not shown X should be a trivial decision to support hybrid is support for Kafka and for PMML (predictive analytic and transactional processing within the modelling mark-up language) though TensorFlow same environment. It is also a strong contender is not supported. Also not shown in this diagram for mid-sized and smaller deployments, is the fact that there is a managed cloud service especially where SQL and traditional relational available for storing and managing Active X approaches are preferred. backups; there are a number of geospatial

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© Bloor 2019