An Integrators view on Actian Matrix DB Platform, or Big Data Storage made simple.
July 26, 2016

An Integrators view on Actian Matrix DB Platform, or Big Data Storage made simple.

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Actian Matrix

Actian Matrix is leveraged by multiple teams and organizations to solve the issues related to data mining and big data crunching. It is a tool used to aggregate data from multiple internal and external sources and perform detailed analysis in a shared repository. It is often used in conjunction with ETL programs to transform and load the data, and then sourced from this repository by multiple analytics platforms, both in house and off the shelf software packages.
  • Handles Various data types from multiple sources.
  • Indexing speed - using the Actian platform as a back end database greatly improved processing time.
  • Its a new product, there are plenty of bugs to work out with regards to converting special reserve characters that might crop up in data.
  • The Matrix 2 Matrix database port tool needs some ironing out.
  • I cannot comment on the specific numbers, all I can say is that switching to the backend greatly improved our processing speed. The more we process through our systems, the more clients we can serve. Which should bump ROI.
  • oracle
Actian Matrix is our first big data analytics storage platform, and as I was not involved in the POC process to compare it to other products out on the market, unfortunately I cannot say if it is better than other Big Data storage options. I can say that it out performs products such as Oracle or UDB in regards to the volume of data it can easily index and handle.
Actian matrix is not good for small data sets. If you have a limited data pool, or do not plan on having multiple users/clients accessing a data source, stick with a more traditional relational database model - Access for the truly small user base, or a DB2 or Oracle back end if your going to have multiple users, and moderate sized data.

Actian is for LARGE data sets (Big Data, in the industry parlance). Millions of rows of data from multiple sources with various down stream systems accessing the database. It is for data analytics of large data groups and intense data mining.

Evaluating Actian Matrix and Competitors

Yes - For the specific applications that now run on Actian Matrix, we replaced back end source databases that ran on Oracle and DB2 Databases. They were replaced because Actian Matrix is a big data analytics database, a columnar database, as opposed to the more traditional relational database. This kind of platform can better process and index large quantities of data, which is what we were looking for. Process - and processing - improvement.
  • Price
  • Product Usability
  • Analyst Reports
Unfortunately, I was not involved in the selection process. I came in on the pilot programs that leveraged the tool ,and its success lead to our company adopting it across a few other application platforms. My team helped both my company, and the vendor (Actian) iron out various conversion issues the tool had - but I was not involved in the decision to go with the platform.
I would include more of the middleware support groups in the process of selecting tools.