About Actian DataConnect¶

Actian DataConnect is a powerful data integration platform that enables organizations to seamlessly integrate, transform, and manage data across diverse sources and destinations—connecting to data whether it resides in the cloud, on-premises, or across hybrid environments.

This release focuses on Data Quality capabilities, providing you with the tools to ensure your data is accurate, complete, and consistent before it flows into your analytics, AI, and business systems.

With Actian DataConnect, you can:

Create and edit data quality designs using the visual Data Quality Designer
Define validation rules to inspect and cleanse data based on your business requirements
Identify data quality issues with intelligent rule recommendations
Execute data quality processes using the standalone engine for production environments
Deploy on-premise for full control over your data quality infrastructure

The Data Quality Designer provides an intuitive interface for building data quality designs that validate and transform your data, ensuring it meets quality standards as it moves between systems. The standalone engine enables you to run these data quality processes in headless production environments.

The Data Quality Designer offers three design approaches, so you can choose how much you want DataConnect to do for you:

Automate Design — minimum user participation: DataConnect creates and chooses the rules for you.
Design Assistance — partial participation: DataConnect creates the rules and you choose which ones to apply.
Manual Design — full participation: you decide which rules to create.

For details, see Three Design Approaches.

Maps and Processes

Map and process designers are not yet available. These designers will be available in a future release. However, the standalone Runtime Engine continues to support maps and processes from previous DataConnect versions via the command line interface.

Actian DataConnect is designed to help you deliver high-quality, trusted data that's ready for analytics, AI initiatives, and critical business decisions.

How This Guide Is Organized¶

The following table summarizes the main topics in this guide.

Topic	Description
Installation	Set up the product for your environment: install DataConnect Studio on Windows to build data quality solutions, and the standalone Runtime Engine on Windows or Linux to run them in production. Covers system requirements, installation steps, and licensing.
Getting Started	Get oriented before you build — what DataConnect does, how to find your way around the Studio interface, and how to create and organize workspaces, configure Studio and engine settings, and apply best practices for architecting solutions and designing for reuse.
Using AI in DataConnect	See how DataConnect's built-in AI inspects your data — detecting field semantic types and common patterns — and recommends data quality rules that you can review, adjust, and apply, so you build a design faster and with less manual setup.
Data Quality	The core of the product: build data quality designs in the Data Quality Designer using one of three approaches — Automate Design, Design Assistance, or Manual Design — then run and review the results. Includes Data Discovery, Data Prep, the SQL Editor, and configuration options, plus the Profile, Remediation, and Data Prep rule references and the DQ source and target connectors.
Macro Manager	Define values you reuse across designs — such as connection strings, file paths, and credentials — as macros, and organize them into macro sets. Includes encrypted macros for protecting sensitive values like passwords.
CLI	Run integration artifacts from the command line with the Actian DataConnect Runtime Engine — an embedded, high-performance, cross-platform engine that executes the data quality designs you create in DataConnect Studio (and maps and processes from previous versions) on Windows and Linux, where the same portable integration package (`.djar` file) runs unchanged on either platform. You can also run data quality designs directly from the command line, using options to override properties, macro values, and other settings at runtime. This section also covers the error codes and messages returned by the engine.