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Embracing Database Modernization: The Key to Future Proofing Your Business

Modernizing your database and apps to align with evolving business needs can improve efficiency, security, compliance, and user experiences while reducing costs and enhancing scalability.

Modernizing your IT infrastructure is the process of updating and even transforming your technologies, systems, and processes to better meet your current and future needs. Taking a strategic approach to modernization, including modernizing your database and apps, can deliver a range of benefits that include:

  • Informed decision making. The ability to integrate all relevant data for transactional processing and timely, accurate insights for better decision making.
  • Improved efficiency. Automation, cloud computing, and advanced analytics can be leveraged to reduce operational costs and improve productivity.
  • Simplified compliance. Modern systems are typically better equipped than legacy technologies to meet compliance and regulatory requirements.
  • Robust security. Modern IT systems often offer enhanced security features and provide regular updates that protect against threats, helping ensure your data is secure.
  • Easy scalability. Modern infrastructures, especially those that are cloud-based, provide immediate scalability to handle changing workloads.
  • Improved customer experiences. State-of-the-art IT systems support chatbots, personalized marketing, and real-time transactions for enhanced customer experiences.
  • Reduced costs. Upfront investments to modernize can be significant, but they reduce technical debt and offer longer-term savings due to efficiency, less maintenance, and reduced downtime.

A strategic approach to modernization that aligns with evolving business and IT needs helps ensure you can capture and optimize the right data—and make it useable across your organization. As highlighted in our eBook “Your Cookbook for Modernizing Actian Ingres and OpenROAD Applications,” the recently enhanced Actian Ingres can play a pivotal role in your modernization journey.

Innovation Demands Modernization

Organizations like yours must have a solid data foundation for driving innovation—and innovate at a pace that allows you to seize trends, meet shifting customer preferences, and offer breakthrough products and features before your competitors do. This requires a high-performance database that delivers trusted, rapid insights without expecting you to use a multitude of different tools.

A modern approach to your database—and your IT infrastructure as a whole—can open new opportunities, such as bringing increased levels of automation, easier system integrations, and the ability to modernize at your pace in the environment you choose, whether it’s on-premises, in the cloud, or a hybrid setting.

The problem with many legacy systems is that they can’t easily integrate with other systems, making it difficult to seamlessly share data, are not scalable to handle growing data volumes, and require IT help to add data pipelines and utilize the data. All of these issues create barriers to rapid insights and limit your ability to take a data-driven approach to innovation, decision making, personalized customer engagement, and other business areas.

The linchpin for success ultimately comes down to your approach to data. And it’s why a modern database that supports better management and utilization of data—without ongoing IT help—is required.

Benefits of Database Modernization

A database with modern features and capabilities delivers benefits such as fast data querying, high levels of efficiency, advanced security, and seamless data manageability without requiring advanced skills. Database modernization can deliver:

  • Flexible modernization paths. Your platform should give you the flexibility and agility to modernize according to your needs. For example, if you choose, you should be able to modernize in-place for better performance and security, or migrate data workloads to the cloud or multiple clouds to meet company mandates for a cloud-first approach to data.
  • Phased approach to the cloud. If you want to move to the cloud, it should be at your pace, allowing you to migrate as you’re ready. This way, you can move data backup and recovery capabilities to the cloud, which is a common cloud use case, but keep other workloads on-premises until you’re ready to move them to the cloud. A phased approach supports a smooth transition with minimal disruption.
  • Advanced capabilities. Modernization entails more than upgrading technologies. It encompasses aligning technology with business priorities to enable you to reach desired outcomes faster—and have confidence in the results. A modern database with user-friendly capabilities lets you deliver new value across your organization while fostering a data-driven culture.
  • Optimized user experiences. A modern database provides fast, reliable access to data. Features such as automated scaling and easy integration with various applications, along with the ability to support complex queries and large datasets, lead to more engaging user experiences and increased productivity.

Bridging the Skills Gap

Modernization efforts simplify data access and management while reducing the time spent on manual tasks such as wrangling and prepping your data. A successful modernization approach also bridges the skills gap for analysts and other data users by making data easy to access and use. The result is more people throughout the company being able to utilize data, which helps unlock the full potential of your data.

A modern approach to building apps complements a modern database by enabling rapid app development, scalability, and integration with cloud services for increased agility and a faster path to innovation. Modernizing your database in addition to app building processes can help you better predict market changes, shorten the timeframe to market, accelerate data-driven innovation, and maintain a competitive advantage.

Actian offers a solution to deliver modern apps quickly. OpenROAD is a database-centric, object-oriented, 4GL rapid application development tool for developing and deploying mission-critical, n-tier business applications. It simplifies app modernization by letting you reuse your existing business logic, making it much easier to offer modern user interfaces.

Trusted Support for Database Modernization

Modernizing your database and applications delivers myriad benefits, yet you must take an eyes-wide-open approach. Complex interdependencies, your data infrastructure, operating systems, and hardware can pose risks when modernizing, so you must consider how they will be impacted.

Actian offers professional services tailored to modernization needs through our Ingres NeXt Initiative to transform your mission-critical Actian Ingres database and OpenROAD applications into open, extensible platforms while reducing risk and accelerating modernization. The expert support ensures a smooth modernization journey while preserving existing investments.

You can also read our comprehensive eBook “Your Cookbook for Modernizing Actian Ingres and OpenROAD Applications” to gain an in-depth understanding of the advantages and strategies for a successful modernization. It covers essential topics such as the benefits of database modernization, having flexibility to choose on-premises or cloud service deployments, and resolving database entanglements.

Additionally, the eBook offers insights on modernizing applications with OpenROAD, preserving your business logic, and enhancing user interfaces. With practical advice and detailed steps, our cookbook equips you to modernize efficiently, ensuring optimal database and app performance and adaptability in a fast-paced, data-driven world.

The post Embracing Database Modernization: The Key to Future Proofing Your Business appeared first on Actian.


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Author: Actian Corporation

Actian Ingres 12.0: Modernize Your Way – Trusted, Reliable, and Adaptable

Our trusted and reliable database delivers performance and flexibility, empowering customers to modernize at their own pace.

As the director of product management for Actian, I’m thrilled to share first-hand insights into the latest enhancements to Actian Ingres. This major release embodies our commitment to customer-driven innovation and reinforces our position as a trusted technology partner.

Actian Ingres 12.0 builds upon the core strengths that have made Ingres a go-to transactional database for decades. We’ve invested heavily in performance, security, and cloud-readiness to ensure it meets customers’ modernization needs.

 

Choice and Flexibility

This release is all about giving customers the power of choice. Whether you’re committed to on-premises deployments, ready to embrace the cloud, or are looking for a hybrid solution, Actian Ingres 12.0 adapts to your modernization strategy.

We have options for Lift/Shift to VM, containerization via Docker and Kubernetes, and plans for bring your own license (BYOL) on the AWS Marketplace. If customers want to take a phased approach, customers have several options. Customers can move first to Linux on-premises, then to virtual machines (VMs) in the cloud, and finally to containers. We’re here to help and want customers to know we have a cloud story to help them in their individual journey.

 

Core Enhancements

We understand that familiarity and reliability are crucial to our users. That’s why Actian Ingres 12.0 strengthens core capabilities alongside exciting new features. We’ve doubled down on investments in these areas to ensure that Ingres remains a database that delivers new and sustainable value; this commitment keeps it relevant for the long term.

Reliability and security are paramount for our customers. Ingres 12.0 strengthens our ability to prevent brute force and Denial of Service (Dos) cyber-attacks, and DBMS security for user privileges to better protect users, roles, and groups.

We’ve added User Defined Function (UDF) support for Python and Javascript, offering a powerful way to extend the functionality of a database or streamline processes.  The use of containers offers an isolated execution environment to keep the DBMS secure.

The X100 analytics engine attracts attention for its superior performance where users have seen significant performance gains for OLAP related activities through the use of X100 tables by emphasizing their speed and efficiency.

X100 Analytics Table

Most notably, we introduced table and schema cloning in this release. This translates into a huge savings for warehouse-oriented customers and eliminates overhead for storage and latency without data duplication. Imagine a simple SQL-based table clone command that can clone not just one, but many tables in a single executed statement, and opens new possibilities for future data sharing and analytics down the line.

Cloud Enablement

Cloud adoption can be complex, but we’re here to make the journey smooth. Migrations can be challenging, which is why we provide support every step of the way. Ingres 12.0 is more adaptive to meet current and emerging business challenges while helping customers who want to move to the cloud to do so at their own pace.

This release brings a long-awaited backup to cloud capability for Actian Ingres that appeals to most data protection strategies. For many organizations, the ability to backup and restore data as part of an off-site disaster recovery strategy is their first objective. This type of backup strengthens business continuity.

Users already deploy Ingres on Linux using Docker and leverage Kubernetes to simplify orchestration. With Ingres 12.0 we now support disaster recovery using IngresSync, a DR utility formerly only available through Professional Services. IngresSync allows users to set up a read-only standby server. Yet another reason to have more confidence stepping into the cloud knowing you can distribute workloads and have disaster recovery options.

 

Performance Matters

Our development team was granted 5 patents with an additional 3 currently pending. This is the type of innovation that helps to differentiate us in areas of performance optimization. These patents touched advances in User Defined Functions (UDFs), index optimization, and continued differentiation with the in-memory storage, tracking, and merging of changes stored in X100 Positional Delta Trees (PDT). This is a tremendous show of passion for perfection by our amazing developers.

We invested in additional performance testing and standardization on industry TPC-H, TPC-DS, and TPC-C benchmarks, making strides release over release, and even more so, when it comes to complex X100 queries. This release also introduces more patents. Our development team was busy submitting eight in total, with only a few yet to be granted. These types of investments uncover various edge cases and costing scenarios that we can improve so users of any workload type can benefit. Of course, mileage varies.

Customers also benefit from more efficient workload management tailored to their specific business needs. Workload Manager 2.0 offers the capability to establish priority-driven queues, enabling resources to be allocated based on predefined priorities and user roles. During peak workload periods, the system can intelligently handle incoming queries by prioritizing specific queues and users, guaranteeing that important tasks are handled promptly while upholding overall system performance and efficiency.

For example, if business leaders require immediate information for a quarterly report, their queries are prioritized accordingly. Conversely, in situations where real-time transactions are crucial, prioritization is adjusted to maintain system efficiency.

 

Modernize With Confidence

Modernizing applications can be daunting. OpenROAD, a database-centric rapid application development (RAD) tool for developing and deploying business apps, continues to make this process easier with improvements to abf2or and WebGen utilities shipped with the product.

Empowering customers to transform their apps and up-level them for the web and mobile helps them stay current in a rapidly evolving developer space. This area of work can be the most challenging of all but having the ability to convert “green screen” applications to OpenROAD, and then on to web/mobile is a great starting point.

OpenROAD users can expect to see a new gRPC-based architecture for the OpenROAD Server. This architecture helps to reduce administration, enhance concurrency support, and is more lightweight because of its use of HTTP/2 and protocol buffers. Our developers were excited to move forward with this project and see it as a big jump from COM/DCOM.

The new gRPC architecture is also microservices-friendly and able to be packaged into a separate container. Because of this, we’ve got our sights set on containerized deployment of the Server in the cloud. In the meantime, we’ve distributed Docker files with this release so that customers can do some discovery and exploration.

 

Driven by Customer Feedback

Actian Ingres 12.0 can help customers expand their data capabilities footprint, explore new use cases, and reach their modernization goals faster. We’ve focused on enabling customers to strategically grow their business using a trusted database that keeps pace with new and emerging business needs.

We want customer feedback as we continue to innovate. Many of the database enhancements are based on direct customer input. We talked with users across industries about what features and capabilities customers like, and what customers wanted to see added. Their feedback was incorporated into our product roadmap, which ensures that Ingres continues to meet their evolving requirements. Plus, with our commitment to best-in-class support and services, every customer can be assured that we’re here to help them, no matter where customers are on their modernization journey.

Ingres is more than just a database. It’s a trusted enabler to help customers become future-fit and innovate faster without barriers. Whether you’re up leveling your version to 12.0 for the new capabilities and improvements, migrating to the cloud, modernizing applications, or leveraging built-in X100 capabilities for real-time analytics against co-located transactional data, Ingres 12.0 has something for everyone.

Resources

The post Actian Ingres 12.0: Modernize Your Way – Trusted, Reliable, and Adaptable appeared first on Actian.


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Author: Douglas Dailey

Actian Ingres 12.0 Enhances Cloud Flexibility, Improves Security, and Offers up to 20% Faster Analytics

Today, we are excited to announce Actian Ingres 12.0*, which is designed to make cloud deployment simpler, enhance security, and deliver up to 20% faster analytics. The first release I worked on was Ingres 6.4/02 back in 1992 and the first bug I fixed was for a major US car manufacturer that used Ingres to drive its production line. It gives me great pride to see that three decades later, Ingres continues to manage some of the world’s most mission-critical data deployments and that there’s so much affection for the Ingres product.

With this release, we’re returning to the much-loved Ingres brand for all platforms. We continue to partner with our customers to understand their evolving business needs, and make sure that we deliver products that enable their modernization journey. With this new release, we focused on the following capabilities:

  • Backup to cloud and disaster recovery. Ingres 12.0 greatly simplifies these configurations for both on-premises and cloud deployments through the use of Virtual Machines (VMs) or Docker containers in Kubernetes.
  • Fortified protection automatically enables AES-256 encryption and hardened security to defend against brute force and Denial of Service (DoS) attacks.
  • Improved performance and workload management with up to 20% faster analytical queries using the X100 engine. Workload Manager 2.0 provides greater flexibility in allocation of resources to meet specific user demand.
  • Elevated developer experiences in OpenROAD 12. We make it quick and easy to create and transform database-centric applications for web and mobile environments.

These new capabilities, coupled with our previous enhancements to cloud deployment, are designed to help our customers deliver on their modernization goals. They reflect Actian’s vision to develop solutions that our customers can trust, are flexible to meet their specific needs, and are easy-to-use so they can thrive when uncertainty is the only certainty they can plan for.

Customers like Lufthansa Systems rely on Actian Ingres to power their Lido flight and route planning software. “It’s very reassuring to know that our solution, which keeps airplanes and passengers safe, is backed up by a database that has for so many years been playing in the ‘premier league’,” said Rudi Koffer, Senior Database Software Architect at the Lufthansa Systems Airlines Operations Solutions division in Frankfurt Raunheim, Germany.

Experience the new capabilities first-hand. Connect with an Actian representative to get started. Below we dive into what each capability delivers.

A Database Built for Your Modernization Journey

Backup to Cloud and Disaster Recovery

Most businesses today have 24×7 data operations, so a system outage can have serious consequences. With Ingres 12.0 we’ve added new backup functionality to cloud and disaster recovery capabilities to dramatically reduce the risk of application downtime and data loss with a new component called IngresSync. IngresSync makes copies of a database to a target location for offsite storage and quick restoration.

Disaster recovery is now Docker or Kubernetes container-ready for Ingres 12.0 customers, allowing users to set up a read-only standby server in their Kubernetes deployment. Recovery Point Objectives are in the order of minutes and are user configurable.

Actian Ingres 12.0 Process to Disaster Recovery
Backup to cloud and disaster recovery are imperative for situations like:

  • Natural disasters: When a natural disaster such as a hurricane or earthquake strikes a local datacenter, cloud backups ensure that a copy of the data is readily available, and an environment can be spun up quickly in the cloud of your choosing to resume business operations.
  • Cyberattacks: In the event of a cyberattack such as ransomware, having cloud backups and a disaster recovery plan are essential to establish a non-compromised version of the database in a protected cloud environment.

Fortified Protection

Actian Ingres 12.0 enables AES-256 bit encryption on data in motion by default. AES-256 bit is considered one of the most secure encryption standards available today and is widely used to protect sensitive data. The 256-bit key size makes it extremely resistant to attacks and is often used by governments and highly regulated industries like banking and healthcare.

In addition, Actian Ingres 12.0 offers user-protected privileges and containerized User Defined Functions (UDFs). These UDFs, which can be authored in SQL, JavaScript, or Python, safeguard against unauthorized activities within the company’s firewall that may target the database directly. Containerization of UDFs further enhances security by isolating user operations from core database management system (DBMS) processes.

Improved Performance and Workload Automation

Actian Ingres 12.0 customers can increase resource efficiency on transactional and analytic workloads in the same database. Workload Manager 2.0 enhances the data management experience with priority-driven queues, enabling the system to allocate resources based on predefined priorities and user roles. Now database administrators can define role-types such as DBAs, application developers, and end users, and assign a priority for each role-type.

The X100 engine, included with Ingres on Linux and Windows, brings efficiency improvements such as table cloning for x100 tables that allow customers to conduct projects or experiments in isolation from core DBMS operations.

Our Performance Engineering Team has determined that for analytics workloads, these enhancements make Actian Ingres 12.0 the fastest Ingres version yet with a 20% improvement over prior versions. Transactional workloads see improved release over release performance.

Elevated Developer Experiences

Actian OpenROAD 12.0, the latest update to the Ingres graphical 4GL, also sees some new enhancements designed to assist customers on their modernization journey.  Surprisingly or not, we still have customers with forms-based applications and while many argue that these are the fastest and most reliable apps for data-entry, our customers want to deliver more modern versions of these apps mostly on tablet style devices. To facilitate this modernization and to protect the decades of investments in business logic, we have delivered enhanced versions of abf2or and WebGen in OpenROAD 12.0.

Additionally, OpenROAD users will benefit from the new gRPC-based architecture, which streamlines administration, bolsters concurrency support, and offers a more efficient framework, thanks to HTTP/2 and protocol buffers. The gRPC design is optimized for microservices and can be neatly packaged within a distinct container for deployment. The introduction of a newly distributed Docker file lays the groundwork for cloud deployment, providing production-ready business logic ready for integration with any modern client.

Leading Database Modernization and Innovation

These latest innovations join our recent milestones to solidify Actian’s position as a data and analytics leader. These achievements build on recent recognitions, including:

With this momentum, we are ready to accelerate solutions that our customers can trust, are flexible to their needs, and are easy-to-use.

Get hands-on with the new capabilities today. Connect with an Actian representative to get started.

 

 

*Actian Ingres includes the product formerly known as Actian X.

The post Actian Ingres 12.0 Enhances Cloud Flexibility, Improves Security, and Offers up to 20% Faster Analytics appeared first on Actian.


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Author: Emma McGrattan