Why Actian Data Platform is 8X Faster Than Snowflake

GigaOm published a comprehensive evaluation of leading cloud data warehouse services based on performance and cost. Offerings analyzed included Snowflake, Amazon Redshift, Microsoft Azure Synapse, Google BigQuery, and our very own Actian Data Platform.

There are many intriguing results included in the report, but an indisputable conclusion was reached by GigaOm: “In a representative set of corporate-complex queries from TPC-H standard, Actian Data Platform consistently outperformed the competition.”

To put “outperformed” in more concrete terms, Actian Data Platform was 8.5X faster than Snowflake in a test of 5 concurrent users. In terms of price performance, the advantage over Snowflake was 6.4X.

Actian Data Platform Was Built for Performance Out-of-the-Box

So what’s the secret behind Actian Data Platform’s superior performance? There is a simple, fundamental explanation. Actian Data Platform was built from the ground up to deliver unrivaled performance on commodity infrastructure. Its original design goal was to makes the most of every CPU clock cycle, every byte of memory, and every I/O operation. And ensuring high performance continues to be a priority for us. Our efficient design is the reason why, even with the limitless resources of the cloud, you won’t see your costs ballooning as you increase concurrent users or data volume.

How specifically does Actian Data Platform deliver best-in-class analytics performance without the need for tuning? It is a combination of the following eight factors. Vendors such as Snowflake may offer a few of the capabilities listed such as Vector processing, but the unique combination creates a powerful compounding effect:

1. Optimizing the Use of Microprocessor Cores to run multiple data operations in parallel during a single CPU cycle. This is known as Vector processing. Traditional scalar architectures typically consume myriad more CPU cycles to compute the same calculations, which impacts overall throughput.
2. Taking Full Advantage of Multi-Core CPUs – Actian Data Platform can perform Vector processing across all available cores, which maximizes concurrency, parallelism, and system resource utilization.
3. Processing Data Using the CPU’s On-Chip Cache is faster and closer to where operations are performed and therefore optimizes performance. Our competitors tend to use DRAM for query execution cache, which is far slower.
4. Using Advanced Compression – Typically With a 5:1 Compression Ratio – Actian Data Platform’s compression algorithms are designed for maximum efficiency, particularly in decompression, yet still deliver about a 5:1 compression ratio. Compression is handled automatically, so no tuning is required.
5. Optimizing I/O – Actian Data Platform is a pure columnar implementation. The data lives its life in columnar format, which results in I/O efficiency.
6. Using Patented Technology to Maintain Indexes Automatically so that an indexing strategy is not necessary.
7. MPP Architecture parallelizes query execution within and across nodes to power through business workloads regardless of size and complexity.
8. Real-Time Updates that enable operational insights with zero performance penalty enabled by Actian Data Platform’s patented positional delta trees.

All this adds up to blazing-fast analytics performance that results in faster iterations on data models, quicker root cause analysis, and ultimately enabling a data-driven organization.

When Cost is More Important Than Performance

If you’re satisfied with the current performance of your data warehouse, Actian Data Platform can deliver that same level of performance while enabling you to dial back your spend on compute resources—which can immediately translate into considerable cost savings. Conversely, if you can benefit from increased performance, Actian Data Platform can give you much more at a much lower cost. In other words, you have two levers to play with – price and performance – and Actian Data Platform enables you to achieve the lowest cost of ownership for the level of performance your business demands.

About Emma McGrattan

As Chief Technology Officer at Actian, Emma McGrattan leads the company’s technology strategy, innovation, and product development in support of Actian’s mission to simplify how companies connect, manage, govern, and analyze data to transform businesses. Since joining the company three decades ago, Emma has played a pivotal role in the evolution and advancement of its analytics, data integration, and data management solutions, including the Actian Data Platform. Emma holds a degree in Electronic Engineering from Dublin City University in Ireland.