OpenText Analytics Database (Vertica) Reviews

• Speed
• Parallelization
• SQL language
• High Availability

I have seen queries that take over 24 hours on MS SQL Server to complete, complete in less than 10 minutes on Vertica. I have seen queries that take several minutes, up to an hour, on MS SQL Server, complete in less than 10 seconds, sometime less than one second on Vertica. That allows analysts to spend their time analyzing results instead of waiting for results. Certain types of analysis weren’t even possible before, simply because it took too long.

While the documentation is very extensive and relatively complete, it’s poorly organized and there are way too few examples. It’s come a long way since the first version I saw, but it still has a long way to go. Plus, there is very little information on the internet. I can find a solution to nearly any MS SQL Server problem using Google. Not so for Vertica.

I've been using it for five years. I started with version 4, which was prior to the HP acquisition.

It’s a breeze to setup if you’re using hardware and an OS that meet the minimum requirements. If you try straying from the recommendations, you can find yourself in trouble.

If your queries and projections are optimized properly, it’s rare that you’ll run into stability issues. Stability issues are usually caused by improperly configured hardware/OS, or poorly written queries/projections.

Scalability is great if you size it correctly to start with. Resizing a cluster isn’t for the faint of heart. All the data needs to be redistributed across the cluster when the cluster size changes, and that can take a very long time, depending on how much data you’re storing.

The technical support for Vertica specifically is great. They still have lots of the original (pre-HP acquisition) support people working there who know the product inside and out.

It's pretty straightforward to get the cluster up and running - assuming you follow the vendor recommendations closely. Getting your data in, setting up projections, optimizing queries, etc. is not as straightforward. If you’ve never used it before, save yourself hours of frustration and hire a Vertica consultant.

The first time I used Vertica, we tried doing it ourselves in the beginning. We learned a lot from our failures, but still weren’t getting the results we’d hoped for. After getting professional services help, we were pointed in the right direction, and that made a world of difference. I highly recommend bringing in someone who knows what they’re doing to get you started on the right foot.

It’s expensive, but it’s good once you get it working properly. Like any complicated software product, you’re paying for years of research and development, support, etc. Everyone’s use case is different, and sometimes it’s difficult to put a price on speed. You pay for the storage, not the number of processors or nodes. They have a community edition that allows up to three nodes with up to one TB of storage. You can try it out for free that way, and once you realize how well it works, you can purchase a commercial license as your storage footprint grows.

At a previous company, we looked at Greenplum as an alternative to Vertica. For our specific use-case, Vertica won the majority of our benchmark tests. If we had a design that required lots of updates and deletes, we may have compromised and gone with Greenplum.

How useful it is depends upon your use case. It’s not a be-all and end-all solution, and it’s great for data that doesn’t change. If you have massive fact and dimension tables, and you need to do analytics on them, this is the Cadillac. If you’re trying to replace your OLTP system, there are better suited solutions out there.

These days, there are lots of alternative solutions in the big data space. Open source vs. Commercial. Every imaginable use case. Just like any project, there is the right tool for the job, but you don’t always know what tools are available. You end up using something because it worked before on a different job, or it’s the cheapest solution. Your best bet is always to closely determine your requirements, then find the best match.

Vertica is our sole data warehouse solution. It is our single point of access to all data loaded from disparate data sources across the organization, and is the single point of truth for all business rules encapsulated in our fact and dimension tables. All of our reporting to all business departments originates from Vertica.  We are also using Vertica's inherent analytic functions, most notably geospatial, and are automating much of our analytics team's R libraries and functions into Vertica for faster processing.

The fast columnar store database structure allows our query times to be at least 10x faster than on any other database. This enables us to get answers to data questions as well as numerous analytics on our data out to our internal and external clients quickly. We are able to integrate our Vertica data warehouse with Tableau to create numerous reports quickly and efficiently. What was once a two year backlog of report requests on our old data system has been virtually eliminated now that we are using Vertica to provide the solutions.

We are able to create complex reports in Tableau by crunching the data in Vertica first and simply extracting the data to Tableau. We have used Vertica to automate manual processes across our business that previously used mostly Excel, and now R, improving efficiency company-wide. We have saved our Analytics Department days worth of man hours each month by using Vertica's Integrated R package instead of their local R Studio implementations. We are also opening new areas of business and potential new revenue streams using Vertica's analytic functions, most notably geospatial, where we are able to run billions of comparisons of lat/long point locations against polygon and point/radius locations in seconds.  

I have found great use out of many features, most notably the Management Console and the Database Designer. Many people with lots of experience creating table projections can get frustrated trying to optimize some complex queries, however, in Vertica, the Database Designer is normally a big help in these situations. You can feed it your problem queries and it will make projection design suggestions for you. The ability to have multiple projections on a table to work with different queries is a big bonus.

The Management Console is an invaluable tool for monitoring the health of our Production and DR clusters. Copy Cluster and Cluster Replication help us keep both easily in sync on a daily basis. Integrated R and geospatial functions are helping us improve efficiency and explore new revenue streams.  

Documentation has become much better, but can always use some improvement. Love the tech support, but hoping Micro Focus will invest in some additional training for the Level 1 responders so they are much more familiar with more areas of the product.

Our system is very stable. In the two years I have administered Vertica at this job, I have had 100% uptime outside of planned outages for upgrades and hotfix applications.

No issues. Amazingly scalable.

Adding one node was very easy, as was adding memory to all nodes. We are currently in the process of setting up a Dev / DR environment which is going very smoothly.

Customer Service:

I have a great relationship with Vertica customer support. They are friendly, knowledgeable, and are quick to respond.

Technical Support:

HPE Professional Services have also been a huge help to us when needed. They are well worth the investment.

It is extremely rare that I ever have an issue with Technical Support. My requests are always given a very quick initial response. Almost always get rapid feedback on my issues, and immediate escalation to the appropriate engineering team, either upon request or when the first level support rep needs additional insights on their own. On rare occasion, I have gotten a rep who is likely newer and almost reading off the script, but I am always able to give them enough info upfront so they avoid most of that, and they accommodate my escalation requests, if necessary.

No, not at this company.

At my last company, we initially used Aster Data (now owned by Teradata). Once our database grew too large, it was unable to handle the number of transactions we were completing per day. Many queries on our largest table were taking from 20 minutes to over an hour to complete. Right out of the box, our longest queries went down to under a minute, most completing in a matter of seconds.

The initial setup was straightforward. We used an HPE-affiliated vendor to purchase and properly set up the equipment, completed a PoC, and then we had HPE Professional Services assist with the transition from our old system to Vertica.

Our Linux team loves it as one of the best installation packages. Initiate on one node, and the RPM propagates automatically to all other nodes.  

We implemented through a vendor. I highly recommend using IIS, they are amazing.

I do all business through IIS. Top notch vendor, they are not just a "call and send a quote" company. I have developed a great professional relationship with my reps over the last five years over two Vertica admin jobs. They come onsite, enable access to the highest levels of Vertica engineering and management when needed, and also have found us opportunities at many of Vertica/HPE/Micro Focus trusted partners, such as Docker and Ormuco.

The pricing, based on raw TB of data stored, is fair and affordable. You can have multiple projections per table without incurring a cost beyond the initial data load. The fact that a Dev and a DR cluster are included in the license cost is a great value!

Work with a vendor, if possible, and take advantage of more aggressive discounts at mid-fiscal year (April) and fiscal year-end (October).

We evaluated Vertica and Greenplum, and chose Vertica due to cost and a number of existing use cases that were nearly identical to ours.

My only advice is to seriously consider using Vertica for your data warehouse needs. I have normally just gone with the flow and learned whatever tools our company chose. When we switched from Aster Data to Vertica, I made the initial recommendation to do so. I am so happy with this product that I am now an HP ASE Certified Vertica Administrator, and moved to a new job that is also using Vertica. I would not have changed jobs if I were not able to continue using this product. I am also recommending to management that we purchase HPE IDOL for our upcoming audio and video analytics needs. HPE Big Data Solutions is a great product suite, and I have bet my career on its future growth.

I can't recommend Vertica highly enough. While no solution is perfect, Vertica offered the most right out-of-the-box, and continues to expand on its offerings with every release. I am looking forward to see what changes come as a result of the Micro Focus spin merger.

Fast query processing for historical data analytics. Write Optimized Store (WOS) continuous data loading without drastically impacting performance of OLAP queries. It's one of the few columnar databases that has the capability to provide near real time data delivery for analytics with minimal delay sourcing data from traditional databases or NoSQL data stores or any unstructured data sources.

With traditional RDBMS historical data analysis or any complex queries took minutes to complete. With the addition of Vertica to handle big data queries, these reports are now returned in under 15 seconds. The biggest performance improvements obviously are for queries that have to analyze a large amount of historical data.

Stability, scalability (3 node Community Edition) and backup/restore all need to be worked on. Without proper work load management and resource pool allocation, any batch/ETL or streaming jobs which refreshes data frequently will impair OLAP query performance.

We've been using the three node cluster for about one and a half years.

We had several incidents where SQL queries with UDF predicates would shutdown the cluster or sometimes a single node. We worked with HP support to get these things fixed with subsequent versions of Vertica.

With the Community Edition we are restricted to three nodes. We have a lot of enterprise clients who stress our cluster to its limits. The only advice I would give to new adopters is that if you want superior performance and reliability you are better off going all-in with the enterprise edition and a large number of nodes; assuming you have a lot of clients who run queries concurrently.

Setup and administration are very easy. Vertica was designed to be operational with minimal Database Administrator effort.

We evaluated various other solutions but we chose Vertica because its SQL implementation is very similar to PostgreSQL, and therefore it saved us lot of development time re-writing SQL queries. Vertica seems to be one of the few columnar database which can handle both ETL/Batch jobs and OLAP queries simultaneously. We stream data into Vertica from RDBMS frequently than what is typically recommended for Columnar databases.

MPP

Analytical functions

HDFS Copy

Resource management

It's enabled us to develop our new reporting system which is used as a SaaS by hundreds of users. We can also load massive amounts of data in seconds and query it with SLA for online dashboards.

• Active-Active clusters with online replication.
• Greater query concurrency.
• Better documentation/white papers as there arte lots of undocumented issues.

I've used it for three to four years.

Rebalancing after adding nodes is an issue in terms of resources and especially locking of tables. It would be nice if this could be more transparent.

8/10

If your product has lots of concurrent queries this solution is not suitable for you, or you need to implement a cache layer.

The speed of Vertica out of the box with the ability it has to perform complex analytics queries. In other databases, information will return in hours or even days while in Vertica it will be finished in minutes or even seconds. This is the best feature it has.

Vertica is in our core technology stack. We are serving reports and dashboard to clients from it. It's very important to us that it fulfills its function correctly and provides us with an advantage over our competitors.

The internal documentation. As a DBA, I really want to understand how its internals works. It needs to handle high concurrency short queries better as Vertica is not handling these well, and we have had to develop our own tool to help us with our dashboard.

I've been using it for five years.

The only thing is that it is very sensitive to network glitches and every time it happens, a node will leave the cluster and we need to re-connect it. Apart from this, the stability is very good.

It is very easy to scale Vertica as you need.

It used to be 10/10 but now it's 8/10. Maybe it's because they were bought by HP which is a big company and the transition is hard.

The last company I worked for shifted from Oracle to Vertica. For our BI queries it's a huge win. Vertica is much better than any other raw store as it is built exactly for complex analytic queries with a huge amount of data.

The earlier version wasn't that good to deploy, but now it's pretty easy to install. If you follow the documentation, you will be OK.

We implemented it in-house. Since it's different than a raw store database, you need to understand the architecture in order to get the most out of Vertica. This means that you will need to design you data model to suit the Vertica architecture otherwise you will get the same performance as the solution you're replacing, or worse. If your implementation is not complex you can just put it in and you will get out of the box improvements, but for complex ones you need to know how Vertica works and build the right design.

It's a great tool but to get the most out of it you will have to design your models to fit it.

Speed of query response time for complicated queries on tables with billions of rows including joins on varchar columns. There is no limitation on which columns can be queried or joined on and we see query times in the milliseconds for a lot of queries that just won't return at all from other products.

Ease of administration. The Management Console we thought was a nice to have turns out to give us insight on what is happening behind the scenes so easily it has sped up query tuning, insight as to what jobs are running, and resource use on the boxes the product sits on.

Style of deployment. We were able to build out a server farm exactly as we are accustomed to. We did not have to buy fancy hardware. Our first cluster was deployed on servers we had sitting around from other migrations and replaced products. As we grow also the growth is native to how we do business.

We can have insight into data we never had before. We can provide that insight to internal users so we do not have to generate reports for them all the time. With response times like these there is no concern of having them wait for results to return and so they do not think things are broken.

Getting the Management Console up and running as expected was a bit of a challenge.

We've been using it for one and a half years.

We have amazing stability. We even had to migrate the databases to other boxes and found it moved the data without much intervention from us and no down time. It worked exactly as a cluster should. We joke here all the time that we would love to say we like Vertica support but since we never need them, we actually do not know!

Scalability is one of the huge strengths of this product, and scalable in a way, as I said before, that is native to how we do business.

We've never had to contact them.

We switched off of Infobright because it was not performant at all at the scale we needed. The number of limitations on Infobright are too many to list in a small review like this.

Initial setup of the database was straightforward.

We did need support though for the initial installation. They were incredibly responsive and helpful and deployment was completed in a very reasonable amount of time despite issues initially getting the Management Console up and running.

Pricing is more than fair. This is very reasonably priced and since it is a perpetual license you are not stuck paying it again and again.

We evaluated Netezza and Teradata alongside Vertica.

Do you want to stand up a data warehouse in a reasonable amount of time using the in-house skills accustomed to dealing with an RDBMS? If that is the case, nothing beats Vertica, hands down.

Having projections as a parallel for indexes in a simple MySQL helped keep our data access fast and optimized.

This product has enabled us to keep very large amounts of data at hand for fast querying. With enough hardware force behind it, we were able to use Vertica as our primary reporting database without having to aggregate data, thus enabling us to provide many reports without having duplicated data or large aggregation steps.

We would like to see better documentation and examples as well as further simplicity in creating clusters, adding nodes, etc. I understand the GUI is very simple but sometimes more insight into what the product is doing and where errors are occurring would help debugging.

We have used HP Vertica for three years.

We have found multiple issues with deployment. Deployment was by far the hardest step in the process. We have very little knowledge of how to set up projects, how they affect query times, and how much additional storage they require.

We have had no stability issues.

Scalability was a problem given we had to host the solution ourselves. It would be great to have a cloud-based solution around Vertica. Also, we found it difficult to modify and update our schema as we grew. Part of the problem may have been that when we first started using Vertica we were inexperienced.

We paid for technical support for one year but did not use it very much so we discontinued its use.

Choosing Vertica was the first time we used a data warehouse solution for handling the large amounts of data we were starting to gather. Since then, we have switched from an internally hosted Vertica to Spark managed externally.

The initial setup was complex.

We implemented it in-house. I would advise anyone to use a vendor unless you have an in-house expert.

I do not have an ROI. It is fair to say that we could not have provided our product to customers without Vertica.

I found paying for the amount of storage we used simple. It was a surprise because we underestimated how much storage projections use and definitely did not purchase the correct license for the amount of data we estimated we would be handling.

The product is great to use, but there is a steep learning curve initially. Also, we found limited resources for basic operations such as setup and deployment. Most tutorials and documentation were regarding how to run queries and use external tools such as Pentaho, which we weren’t using. We just wanted good explanations of how to optimize using projections, etc. I think it can be a great product if used correctly and implemented by a team who is familiar with the product.

The most valuable feature is the merge function, which is essentially the upsert function. It's become our ELT pattern. Previously, when we used the ETL tool to manage upserts, the load time was significantly longer. The merge function load time is pretty much flat relative to the volume of records processed.

HP Vertica has helped us democratize data, making it available to users across the organization.

We've had issues with query time taking longer than expected for our volume of data. However, this is due to not understanding the characteristics of the database and how to better tune its performance.

We've been using HP Vertica for three years, but only in the last year have we really started to leverage it more. We're moving to a clustered environment to support the scale out of our data warehouse.

We use it as the database for the our data warehouse. In it's current configuration, we use it as a single node, but we're moving to a clustered environment, which is what the vendor recommends.

We had no issues with the deployment.

We've had no issues with the stability.

We've had no issues scaling it.

I'd rate technical support as low to average. The tech support provides the usual canned response. We've had to learn most of how to harness the tool on our own.

I haven't used anything similar.

HP Vertica was in place when I joined the company, but it wasn't used as extensively as it is now.

We implemented it in-house, I believe.

Loading into HP Vertica is straightforward, similar to other data warehouse appliance databases such as Netezza. However, tuning it for querying requires a lot more thought. It uses projections that are similar to indexes. Knowing how to properly use projections does take time. One thing to be mindful of with columnar databases is that the fewer the columns in your query, the faster the performance. The number of rows impacts query time less.

My advice would be to try out the database connecting to your ETL tools and perform time studies on the load and query times. It's a good database. It works similar to Netezza from my experience but it is a lot cheaper. Pricing is based on the size of the database.