Actian/Matrix, please do not shut down your shop
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
Actian Matrix is being used as analytical tool to answer analytical questions business might have. Business inteligence group uses this database. It is not used across organization. Business has to run aggregate query on top of billion of rows - they use Matrix. BI team has to create internal reports (KPI), and Matrix is being used to do all the processing, [as well as] joins between multiple tables to generate aggregated report. Also, this is the source of a data virtualization layer.
Pros
- Super fast. Aggregate query such as SUM(), Count() returns result within seconds from a table with more than billion records.
- Excellent data compression.
- Easy maintenance. We managed this database without having a full time DBA.
- Support ANSI SQL and ODBC/JDBC. It's easy to connect to this database from other systems.
Cons
- Dashboard for Admin instead of a linux console.
- Admin with ability to kill inactive sessions when sessions reaches to more than allowed sessions. We ended up restarting the database.
- Ability to easily scale up database by adding extra node.
- Better support from Actian.
Likelihood to Recommend
[Actian Matrix is well suited for:]
1. Power user who wants to derive aggregate metrics by joining huge dataset.
2. Batch load where you have to load billion of records very fast (copy command).
3. Scenario where you want to do ELT because your ETL tool cannot handle huge volume of data.
