Actian Data Platform

One of the company’s primary offerings is the Actian Data Platform (see Figure 1), a holistic data platform providing unified data management across a range of deployment environments (including on-prem, (multi/inter) cloud, and hybrid) and data types (including structured, unstructured, and semi-structured). The platform has been designed to make data “trusted, flexible and easy”, and features database capabilities as well as data analytics and warehousing, data integration (including integration as a service), data quality, workload management, and more. With the acquisition of the data discovery platform Zeenea, it offers metadata management, data cataloguing, and data discovery as additional features. The platform also provides support for storing (and thence querying) columnar data, as well as auto-tuning and other performance optimisations. Data integration in particular is offered within the platform, as well as on premises, through the Actian DataConnect product.

Moreover, the Actian Data Platform is highly integrable and API-friendly, providing a high degree of connectivity. This allows you to supplement its wide range of built-in functionality with third-party tooling. It is compatible with both data fabric and data mesh architectures and is equipped to support generative AI and machine learning. Full access to the Actian Data Platform is provided through a single pane of glass control plane, complete with a low-/no-/pro-code user interface.

Customer Quotes

“The system that we currently operate on, because it is so stable and it has been maintained for so long, is very reliable and works consistently.”
Hallo Healthcare

“We have been able to save a huge amount of time spent pulling data and manually reconciling data when we find errors or discrepancies. We are now able to actually spend time analysing areas to move the business forward.”
Aeriz

Actian Data Platform’s core differentiator, at least in terms of data integration, is that it offers effective, proven integration as a service, alongside robust data quality and warehousing functionality, within a much broader data ecosystem solution provided by a single, unified platform. This provides a great deal of flexibility in how you can handle your data during the integration process, while ensuring that it remains trusted and high quality.

The data integration process itself is designed to be easy to use, both in and of itself and alongside accompanying technologies like data ingestion, quality, and preparation. To this end, it includes real-time, event-driven data ingestion via an extensible library of prebuilt connectors, REST and SOAP APIs, and desktop data loading for on-premises data; data preparation and transformation actioned using a no-/low-/pro-code transformation builder, a drag-and-drop transformation canvas, and automated transformation scheduling; the integrated application of data quality; and secure, real-time data delivery. The data integration processes themselves are designed using templates and/or guided workflows, and there is a management interface for centrally monitoring all of your ongoing and completed processes, regardless of where those integration processes are occurring or have occurred.

Actian’s data quality capability, which is frequently leveraged in concert with its data integration functionality, uses data quality rules to drive data remediation, with sufficiently poor-quality data remediated automatically based on provisions described in each rule. Automated rule generation is available, as are a selection of industry-specific packs of predefined quality rules. Rules can vary in their methods: they can check whether the data exists at all, they can check if it matches a particular pattern, and so on. Data can be moved to a specific location automatically after a given result from these checks (which ties into data integration in an obvious way) and the platform can send out a notification to the relevant users when a check fails. Data quality can be run on demand or on an automated schedule and is supported by drag and drop data profiling as well as a data quality dashboard, which features – among other things – a run history and a results summary.

Actian also provides an impressive range of connectivity options, enhanced by its in-platform data interoperability solution, Actian Connect. More than 300 connectors are provided out of the box, alongside REST API integration. Actian Connect is supported by Actian’s newly released Connector Factory, a means for users to quickly and easily create their own connectors, over and above the ones Actian already provides. Actian Connect also provides automated data pipeline deployment and workload scheduling.

Actian has a significant history in the database market. Accordingly, the Actian Data Platform benefits from the sort of reliability that you can only get from a product and company that has been in the market, in one form or another, for decades.

More concretely, the combination of data integration and data quality that Actian provides should not be sniffed at. Not only are these capabilities often vital in and of themselves, but it is frequently beneficial to deploy them together by building data quality profiling and remediation into your data integration processes, thereby ensuring that the data that lands is of high quality. This is particularly important for supporting data analytics – one of the primary use cases for data integration – due to how deleterious poor-quality data can be (and frequently is) to statistical analysis. This is likewise the case for providing training data to machine learning and (generative) AI processes: these technologies rely on high quality data to function well, so it is in your best interest to make sure they get it.

It is also important to remember that data integration and data quality are only two of many areas of data functionality that the Actian Data Platform offers. The flexibility in managing your data that this provides is substantial.

Finally, it is worth reiterating that the Actian Data Platform’s connectivity and integration options are rather impressive, especially with the addition of the Connector Factory, as is its single pane of glass management layer.

The bottom line

The Actian Data Platform provides a robust and versatile solution for a range of data management use cases, particularly data integration and data quality, that offers a vast array of connectivity options as well as significant ease of use features. In short, it is very much worth your consideration.