Insight to Insights

A fellow recent hire at Actian, Walter Maguire, told me that many organizations get frustrated with having to wait into the late morning for decision support databases to be loaded and indexed or OLAP cubes to be populated with transactional data before sales analysis can be performed. This is not a new problem. I remember when I worked for British Telecom, our biggest worry was to complete the overnight batch updates to our mainframe CA-IDMS database, so we could start the IBM CICS transaction processing service, allowing employees to accept bill payments and check balances.

In the retail business, knowing how products are sold is critical. In the days before in-store POS systems sent daily updates to HQ, I worked at Coppernob, which owned 126 Top Shop stores. Every Saturday night, couriers collected Kimble tags containing bar codes that we scanned on Sunday to create reports showing sales across the UK. The Ingres database would index the sales tables to work out what designs were hot that week.

Fast forward to the present, and modern fashion titans like Kiabi are leveraging the power of Actian Vector for an in-depth analysis of sales data, utilizing cutting-edge predictive analytics to fine-tune their marketing strategies, particularly focusing on markdowns. By doing so, they can now efficiently track and optimize their marketing promotions, pinpointing the most effective markdowns to drive sales. Kiabi’s integration of Actian Vector has revolutionized the speed at which they can extract valuable insights, propelling their decision-making process to new heights. The comparison between using their traditional Oracle RDMS and the game-changing Actian Vector is starkly illustrated in the performance difference showcased in the chart below:

Having the ability to bypass the bulk update and indexing process gives organizations more time to gain more insights.

About Actian Corporation

Actian makes data easy. Our data platform simplifies how people connect, manage, and analyze data across cloud, hybrid, and on-premises environments. With decades of experience in data management and analytics, Actian delivers high-performance solutions that empower businesses to make data-driven decisions. Actian is recognized by leading analysts and has received industry awards for performance and innovation. Our teams share proven use cases at conferences (e.g., Strata Data) and contribute to open-source projects. On the Actian blog, we cover topics ranging from real-time data ingestion, data analytics, data governance, data management, data quality, data intelligence to AI-driven analytics.