Getting Started with Actian Zen

Welcome to the Actian Zen Developer Getting Started Guide.

Actian Zen is a portfolio of fully featured data management products that scale from mobile and IoT devices, to edge computing devices and complex machinery, to networked workstations and servers, and up to the cloud. All product editions use a common, secure data storage format, so your data is fully transportable between all editions without any ETL. All editions also support common data access methods, so the same code can be compiled for any platform.

In an IoT or edge data management configuration, each device’s applications can leverage their own database, allowing them to store and process data locally, or they can act as a client to communicate data to another database engine running on the network.

Actian Zen engines support a wide variety of development environments, including SQL (ODBC, JDBC, ADO.NET, and more) and NoSQL (Btrieve, Btrieve 2). What makes Actian Zen unique is the ability to access your data using any mix of environments and applications – a Btrieve 2 application running on an Android phone can access data residing on an iPhone or a Raspberry Pi at the same time as a SQL application running locally on those devices.

In this guide, we will step through tutorials covering basic commands and procedures for setting up the Actian Zen database, configuring a programming environment, and performing simple Create, Read, Update, Delete (CRUD) operations.

The navigation menu on the left lists a range of scenarios for installing and setting up Actian Zen and accessing its data.

For additional setup details, or to learn how to set up Actian Zen for other platforms or APIs, see Preparing to Install Zen and Overview of Zen Access Methods.