Name: OpenText Analytics Database (Vertica)
Brand: OpenText
Rating: 4.1 (90 reviews)

Senior Product Manager (Data Infrastructure) and Security Researcher at a tech company

Jul 4, 2013

Great Platform

If you are in the topic of Databases, you should know who is Dr. Michael Stonebraker, who is right now an adjunct professor in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, considered like one of the world experts in this field. Why I began in that way? Because Dr. Stonebraker co-founded Vertica Systems, seeing the innovation behind this amazing product.

But, What is Vertica?

Vertica Analytic Database is a high performance MPP (Massive Parallel Processing) columnar engine optimized to deliver faster query results in the shortest time. I said optimized because this is a keyword inside the Vertica team: every piece of code in Vertica has a lot of research and innovation, which I will discuss later. I heard abut this database when I was writing a research paper for my organization about MPP systems, and I found that Vertica was one of the good players in this Big Data Analytics game (the other good players are the Greenplum Database and Teradata’s Aster Data Platform). Then, HP saw the great opportunity that this product represented for the Big Data business and acquired the company in 2011.

OK, let’s talk now about some of the Vertica’s features

Column-based storage:
Vertica use a patented architecture called FlexStore^TM, created based on three principles: the grouping of multiples columns in a single file, the selection of disk storage format based on data load patterns automatically, and the ability to differentiate storage media by their performance characteristics and to enable intelligent placement of data based on usage patterns
Advanced Data compression:
Based on the choosed architecture by Vertica team of grouping columns in a single file; the data compression follows the same principle: Vertica organizes values of similar data types contiguously in memory and on disk, enabling to select the best compression algorithm depending of the data type. This improves dramatically the query execution and parallel load times
Built-in Analytics functions:
Vertica comes with a completed packages of useful functions for Analytics, divided by topics like Natural Language Processing, Data Mining, Logistic Regression, etc. This is called User-Defined Extensions. You can read more about this here in this whitepaper
Automatic High Availability:
Vertica allows to scale your data almost without limits, with remarkable features like automatic failover and redundancy, fast recovery, and fast query performance, executing queries 50x-1000x faster eliminating costly disk I/O.
Native integration with Hadoop, BI and ETL tools:
Seamless integration with a robust and ever growing ecosystem of analytics solutions.

You can read deeply about all these features here. The last version of the platform is Vertica 6, and here you can find some of the new features and improvements in this version, or you can view this video, where Luis Maldonado, Director of Product Management at Vertica, explaining a quick overview of this version.

Ok, it’s a great platform, but who are using it today?

There are a lot of companies that are trusting in Vertica today: Twitter, Zynga (th number # 1 company in the Social Gaming industry), Groupon, JPMorgan Chase, Mozilla, AT&T, Verizon, Diio, Capital IQ, Guess Inc,and many more. Read its testimonials here.

Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.

it_user4518

Head of Databases at a retailer with 501-1,000 employees

Feb 25, 2013

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Great DW value for the money, but needs better workload management

Pros and Cons

"We are using Vertica because it is a fast and reliable data warehousing tool and provides us a very good data compression ratio."

"We can’t use Vertica as a transactional database because it is unable to handle lot of transactions."

Valuable Features:

• As it can load a lot of data very quickly, it is very helpful for our organization in managing our VLDB. • It has the lowest cost per TB compared to other DW solutions. • Provides us clustering for our commodity hardware and a good data compression ratio compared to other DW tools I've looked into. • It is very scalable. We didn’t face any problems in terms of installation. • Allows concurrent users access. Our staff can process and send query requests simultaneously -- it responds to all requests very efficiently. • It is very easy to use! It also is good in providing OLAP support to our database system. We can also use traditional SQL queries and tables.

Room for Improvement:

• We can’t use vertica as a transactional database because it is unable to handle lot of transactions. • While copying tables straight across from MYSQL, we observe poor performance. Queries take more time for execution. • Our team is challenged during peak loads because of a lack of work load management options. • It doesn’t offer us any configuration options for reducing the size of our database system and limiting our resource usage.

Other Advice:

We are using Vertica because it is a fast and reliable data warehousing tool and provides us a very good data compression ratio. It is cheap in terms of overall cost per TB and also requires less human resource for maintenance and tuning. Vertica I have been told has improved cloud deployment capabilities on any infrastructure.

Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.