New Actian features target data discoverability, reliability

New capabilities

Actian's launch of embedded data governance, including data contracts, in data pipelines and automated registration of data products in a data marketplace are intended to provide Actian customers with data governance capabilities that foster innovation, according to Emma McGrattan, the vendor's CTO.

"Active metadata and data contracts are the glue holding this all together," she said. "These aren't just buzzwords -- they are what allow teams across the enterprise to speak the same language about data, trust what they're using and automate the messy stuff behind the scenes."

Data contracts are agreements between data stakeholders that define what data will be delivered, how it will be structured, the conditions under which it will be provided to consumers, what the data means, its quality and its timeliness.

Their intent is to simplify -- and make uniform -- how data is used across complex data ecosystems.

By automatically embedding data contracts into development workflows, potential data quality and compliance problems that can crop up as development and eventual deployment progress can be avoided.

Meanwhile, automated registration of data products in the Actian Data Intelligence Platform's enterprise data marketplace ensures that users can find relevant data and makes discoverable applications built by one department that might aid someone in another department.

Ask AI further simplifies data discovery by enabling users to search for data using natural language rather than code. This makes it faster for developers and engineers to find needed data while also enabling nontechnical users to work with data without requiring the help of trained experts.

Kevin Petrie, an analyst at BARC U.S., termed the additions gradual. However, while not necessarily market-influencing innovation, he noted that adding governance and aiding discovery are nevertheless valuable for Actian users.

"While these are incremental additions to Actian's portfolio, I do like the notion of building a data contract into the pipeline itself, then automating the updates and registry in the catalog," Petrie said. "This provides a nice level of governance and confidence to data teams as they support AI training and inference in particular."

Perhaps the most significant benefit of the new features is the control they enable across domains within an enterprise, he continued.

"The overall approach of governing data pipelines and workflows across platforms is a strong differentiator," Petrie said. "Most enterprise data environments span multiple data centers or clouds, and [enterprises] want to simplify how they control quality and usage in a consistent fashion."

Aslett, meanwhile, highlighted the benefits of Ask AI. He noted its potential to aid data-informed decision-making by enabling nontechnical users to query and analyze data without having to wait for trained experts to build and interpret data products such as reports and dashboards.

"Ask AI is likely to prove particularly important in terms of enhancing self-service data discovery," he said.

Regarding the impetus for developing the new features, McGrattan cited the shift from centralized data governance toward federated data governance as the main motivation.

Traditionally, data was overseen by centralized data teams. As data volume has grown and become more complex, domain expertise has become more important, with those in departments such as finance and human resources better understanding their data than data experts trained in statistics and computer science.

As a result, many organizations have adopted data mesh and other federated data management structures that enable domains to oversee their own data while connecting the domains through data catalogs, data marketplaces and other tools.

"Traditional centralized governance doesn't scale when dozens of teams are creating data sets independently," McGrattan said. "At Actian we believe that enterprises need to enforce governance by design, where governance is embedded in the DNA of every data interaction, not bolted on afterward."

Looking ahead

As Actian plots product development, ensuring that data is organized and prepared to inform AI tools and drive business decisions is the vendor's primary focus, according to McGrattan.

Toward that end, automation with AI-powered capabilities such as smart classification, enabling governance at scale across an entire enterprise, integration between systems in different organizational domains and data observability to improve data quality are all part of Actian's roadmap.

"It's not just about managing metadata," McGrattan said. "It's about ensuring the data is organized, governed and ready to drive responsible AI and business decisions."

Petrie, meanwhile, suggested that Actian broaden its AI and machine learning capabilities with new and expanded partnerships with third-party providers.

"I'd recommend they consider extending their partnerships," he said.

Eric Avidon is a senior news writer for Informa TechTarget and a journalist with more than 25 years of experience. He covers analytics and data management.