How To Use Actian Vector, The High Performance Database

To watch the youtube video on this topic, please click here. 

Introduction - Actian Vector

As people who work with computers, we always have a need for persistent storage, meaning databases. Database performance is a big deal - not only do we need databases to hold large amounts of data ("big data"), but we need to be able to access and handle that data quickly. 

​Actian Vector is a high performance analytic database. It's extremely optimized for x86 CPUs, meaning it's really fast and really efficient. It's also free to download and use. 

Let's Play With It - Locally, AWS, and Azure

In a series of blog posts, we're going to work with Actian Vector and learn how to use it. We're going to work with Actian in three of the most important platforms possible: Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and our own computer. 

What exactly are we going to do? We're going to visualize some data. Simply put, we're going to upload some data to Actian, and then we're going to access that data and visualize it in some useful way. Sounds super simple, right? It is. 

The Dataset and Visualization

For our project, we're going to visualize a dataset from the US Department of Transportation. Basically, we're going to visualize airplane data from 1987 to 2017, from everything to flight times, any cancelled flights, flying distances, etc. That seems like a fun dataset, right? It's also very large, 130 Gigabytes of data! We'll get to see how fast Actian is when we query the data.

Speaking of queries, we'll have to visualize this data in some manner, right? We'll go over some ideas on what parts of the data would be good to demonstrate using some charts, and we'll build a visualization dashboard using Vector as our database.

Register For An Actian ID (Free)

Before we get started working, we'll need to register for an Actian ID. It's a pretty standard form. Go ahead and go to Actian's registration page and fill out the info. You'll receive an email confirmation. Open it and click the link. Then on the page that shows up, enter your username, press the submit button, and you're good to go! Free access to everything. 

Next Up - Loading The Data Locally, Into AWS, and Into Azure

This was just an introductory blog post: in the next three blog posts, we'll look at loading the dataset into Actian locally on our own computer, onto AWS, and onto Azure. We'll see how to do that, and we'll also make queries on the database to visualize the data.

Of course, once we've done all of that, we'll be Actian masters and can use it for any big data project or dataset we want too of our own. 

To see the blog post on installing and loading data with Actian locally, click here.
To see the blog post on visualizing data with Actian locally, click here. {Blog post not finished yet.}
To see the blog post on working with Actian on AWS, click here. {Blog post not finished yet.}
​To see the blog post on working with Actian on Azure, click here. {Blog post not finished yet.}

​Like this content and want more? Feel free to look around and find another blog post that interests you. You can also contact me through one of the various social media channels. 

Twitter: @srcmake
Discord: srcmake#3644
Youtube: srcmake
Twitch: www.twitch.tv/srcmake
​Github: srcmake

References:
1. Actian Vector's homepage.
2. Register for an Actian ID.