Actian, a provider of software for data management, analytics and integration, has announced support for Apache Spark in the latest release of Actian Vector in Hadoop (VectorH). Actian Vector technology exploits vectorized processing and multi-level in-memory acceleration to improve performance on Hadoop data stores. It supports single node, clustered, and hybrid computing environments that span on-premise and the cloud.
Customers are facing numerous challenges dealing with dynamic, hybrid data environments, said John Bard, senior director of marketing at Actian. Complexity is amplified by the growing assortment of data sources both inside and outside their companies and the need to make data available quickly to an increasingly diverse set of users. As a result, said Bard, it is critical to have tools that are the best fit for the job. In the case of Hadoop-based workloads, this means having a tool that provides high performance and broad access through industry-standard SQL and providing support for popular tools and capabilities.
While market adoption of Spark is still in the nascent stages, Bard said, Actian wanted to offer native support early to enable the growth of Spark as a solution for customers seeking to deploy advanced analytics.
According to the company, Actian VectorH opens up analytics functionalities for Apache Spark users who benefit from features built on top of Spark, including machine learning, streaming analytics and predictive analytics, and creates a modern production platform that offers security, real-time data refreshes, resource management in the Hadoop cluster, and query optimization. Moreover, industry-standard SQL support enables the use of popular tools such as Tableau, Qlik, and others to access data in Hadoop.
Key advantages of VectorH, says Actian, is that it enables extensibility of the database from single node processing to accelerate performance in Hadoop clusters. Workloads of standard benchmark queries that typically take over 2 hours with traditional SQL solutions on Hadoop finish in less than a minute running on VectorH, the company says. In addition, the company says, unlike traditional Hadoop analytics solutions, Vector H can processes real-time data updates without any associated performance penalty.
Support for Apache Spark in Actian VectorH, is immediately available. To learn more, go here. Actian will be at booth #350 at the Strata Data Conference taking place September 25-28 at the Javits Center in New York City.