In an acquisition deal announced on Thursday, Actian Corp. revealed that it has taken over ParAccel, the 2007-founded company which offers the Massively Parallel Processing (MPP) database of the same name.

With Actian - earlier called Ingres Corp - being the Computer Associates spinoff behind the open source relational database Ingres, the acquisition of ParAccel by the company chiefly fills a gap in a portfolio which already includes the Vectorwise high-speed analytical database that is restricted single-server SMP deployments.

About the evident ParAccel advantage for Actian, Steve Shine - the CEO of Actian - told InformationWeek that ParAccel's MPP architecture allows Vectorwise's
50-terabyte sweet spot to scale out, in distributed manner, on tens, hundreds or even thousands of commodity servers.

Despite the fact that the financial terms of Actian's acquisition of ParAccel have not been officially disclosed, Shine said that Actian has taken over 100% of the company; acquiring the combined interests of investors including Amazon, Bay Partners, Walden International, MDV, Menlo Ventures, and Tao Venture Partners.

Meanwhile, noting that Actian is apparently getting set to face the growing data challenges of the present day, Robin Bloor - co-founder and chief analyst of the Bloor Group - said: "With the ability to capture, ingest, analyze, and take action on data at scale, Actian is now very powerfully positioned in the big data and data analytics markets."