OpenText Analytics Database (Vertica) Reviews

Before we used Vertica we used another columnar database which turned out to be very unstable and its performance was inconsistent. Vertica turned that around, to the point that it is now our go-to database. We became Vertica partners.

Vertica is a columnar database, this support our developments in analytics, advanced analytics, and our ETL process with large sets of data.

I believe the installation process could be streamlined.

No stability issues.

No scalability issues.

They are very professional and responsive.

See "Improvements to organization," above.

There are some considerations to be evaluated before you start the installation, but the installer does the respective checks so things will function properly. And there are a lot of options.

The first TB is free and you can use all the Vertica features. After 1TB you have to pay for licensing. The product is worth it, but be aware of this condition, and plan. The compression ratio is explained in the documentation.

Infobright and MonetDB.

The technical requirements for the product are really important. The design tool for vertica is the core of the database for performance. Never forget to use it to create projections to optimize the storage compression and response times. Better compression means the 1TB mark takes longer to be reached.

Partition and join back to node are easy and simple for DBAs.

DBAs don’t need to add a partition every month/quarter like with other DBs.

There are a lot of limitations within this product and it makes things extremely hard for developers. It lacks Stored Procedure, packages, and triggers like other RDBMs.

Yes, we have encountered issues with Projections and performance.

Very bad support, I would rate it two out of 10.

We use DB2, Oracle , MySQL, MSSQL. We switched to Vertica to explore it for  future projects.

Easy setup. Much easier than setting up Oracle RAC.

Licensing is based on size of the database.

They did a good PoC and we were impressed with Vertica. However, when we implemented, it was nightmare with bad support.

My advice regarding this product is a definite "no", due to bad support.

It enabled delivery of a new Agile Data Warehousing Service.

It enabled us to close large deals. Customers with large data sets had to be migrated from PostgreSQL to Vertica due to performance.

• Clustered database
• Horizontal scaling
• Disaster recovery
• Columnar Storage
• Compression (you read only columns you need)
• Immutable storage
• Fast ingesting

Performance of management of metadata layer (database catalog) needs improvement. We still have to have smaller customers on PostgreSQL; Vertica cannot manage thousands of schemata.

Query performance: Improve either Database Designer (automation of projection design) or performance of queries using suboptimal projection design.

Scaling of execution independently on storage: Upcoming Eon Mode (now Beta in Amazon) will hopefully solves this.

Encountered stability issues three times during last three years.

Suboptimal projection design causes queries to not scale linearly.

The metadata layer does not scale linearly.

Metadata for database files scale okay, but metadata related to tables/columns/sequences must be stored on all nodes.

I have experience with legacy vendors of enterprise RDBMS solutions, and I rate Vertica support to be much better.

In my current company I was not responsible for the switch. As far as I know, they switched from PostgreSQL, especially because of performance of analytical queries processing large data.

Just getting Vertica running is straightforward. However, with an increasing number of customers, we had to develop our own tooling. For example:

• Automated deployment
• Monitoring, alerting
• Backup/restore.

Start with license per 1TB. Starting from hundreds of TB there is unlimited licensing to be considered.

Move historical data to HDFS/S3 which are significantly cheaper or even free.

Vertica is delivering more and more features to support load/unload for external storages.

2012 - Detailed evaluation including benchmarks of: Greenplum, Vectorwise.

2017 - Evaluation of features and initial communication with vendors, if needed, for: Greenplum, EXASOL, Amazon Redshift, Spark, SAP HANA, IBM dashDB, Snowflake, Azure SQL.

It is easy to implement this solution for one customer. By tuning the model (projection design) you get incredible performance. You won’t face issues with metadata (catalog) layer up to tens of thousands of tables.

It can be a challenge to operate clusters for many customers with varied data pipelines. Consider using Database Designer.

Don't hesitate to push Vertica (through support/product management) to improve it.

Consider implementing your own tools to automate performance tuning tasks.

• I found the columnar storage, which increases performance of sequential record access, to be the most valuable feature. 
• I also like the projection feature, which increases query performance.

• The workload on our ETL tools were reduced. 
• All joint operations were enhanced by creating identically segmented projections.

Limitations in group by projections is where I would like to see an improvement. 

We have not had any issues with deployment.

We have not had any issues with stability.

We have been able to scale it for our needs.

It is a good database that can be used for ad hoc queries as well as analytical queries.

Vertica’s analytic capabilities are its key strength. It can aggregate and analyze data at massive scale and neatly bring the calculation logic to the data with external procedures in C, Java and R.

The Vertica architecture means it can process/ingest data in parallel to reporting and analyzing because of its in-memory Write-Optimized Storage sitting alongside the analytics optimized Read-Optimized Storage.

Which brings us to projections and the DB designer which intelligently structures how data is actually stored on disk to improve the queries you actually run against it. So tables are a logical construct which are operated on as per other DBMS systems, but there’s a whole next level of intelligence in optimization for querying that puts Vertica in another league.

Our consultancy has introduced Vertica to a number of clients, from small scale ones who benefit from the free tier and per TB pricing model to have a powerful analytics cluster fairly cheaply to large investment banks who have been able to handle data at a scale that wouldn’t otherwise be possible.

We’ve built a data ingestion tool to sit alongside Vertica for easy data loading, and I would personally like to see extended developer tooling suited to Vertica – think published PowerDesigner SQL dialect support, IDE with IntelliSense, and stored procedures which we’ve also had to build a work-around module for.

Personally, I've used it for three to four years (since v6), but a few others in Thorium Data Science have used it for longer.

We've had no issues. You do need to invest a little time to understand how to set things up and optimize for your workload, but it’s all well documented and there are consultancy firms who will happily help with that.

We've had no issues with the stability.

We've had no issues scaling it.

It's very good. HP have some technically smart guys and are willing to give access to them when you start using Vertica. We’ve had some great support from their engineering team with things like telling us about upcoming features (snapshotting, in this case), which were spot on for a need a client of ours had. We were looking into engineering a solution ourselves and HP happened to have just what we needed coming down the pipeline in the next version.

We previously used Exadata, which is typically very expensive by comparison. This is because Oracle throw top end hardware at the problem as opposed to
HP Vertica’s commodity hardware and smart software approach.

It takes some time to come to grips with the various considerations. I’d suggest bringing in a consultant if you don’t have the time or inclination to do it yourself as it takes going through and install and configuration one or two times to really understand the implications of the different options.

The implementation itself is excellent with fantastic features, speed and scalability. They lose a point only for the development experience which relies on third party tooling like squirrel, and not having SQL based stored procedures.

Go for it! Try the pre-installed VM which HP offers to have a play with it and get a feel for it. It can certainly scale better than any other RDBMS and pushes the envelope of SQL analysis so you can query/analyze/report “BIG-DATA” without having to resort to the complications associated with Hadoop & unstructured data analysis. If your data is structured and large Vertica is what you need.

Two of them:

• The core feature, meaning their highly efficient columnar file format and execution engine along with a great coverage of ANSI SQL, provides our analysts with a highly expressive and performing platform.
• The extensibility and efficiency provided by their C++ SDK.

Before Vertica, we used a combination of sharded RDBMSs and Hive: the typical runtime for a query was in the hours. It's now in the seconds, with way
more data than then (we're talking hundreds of terabytes).

Whatever's out, the core is not always as great as the engine, especially their first version. That's true, for example, for the Kafka or Hadoop integration.
But they're getting better release after release.

Four years.

Vertica's code, being designed to use the hardware at its maximum, is very sensitive to low level changes such as kernel bumps or GLibC upgrades. It's also important to do tests on the storage layer (RAID controller + disks).

The default layout (all nodes running spread) introduces latencies in query planning when you reach about 60 nodes, in our experience. Switching to a large cluster (one control node per rack) would be advised, way before reaching the 128 nodes hard limit.

It's really great. One of the best I had to deal with. They also assisted us during the development phase of the custom components we've designed.

Not really in the same area (MPP databases). However, we ran benchmarks back then against a bunch of competitors and Vertica was one of the fastest, while
being relatively cheap and able to accommodate our hardware.

The setup per se was pretty straightforward. However, it took us some time to design the most efficient loading pattern from Hadoop.

Nothing to advise really; try it out first, it's free up to three nodes and 1TB, and then get in contact with their sales guys.

We did evaluate mostly SAP HANA and SQL Server PDW back in 2013, along with a bunch of OSS solutions.

If you plan to use Vertica for different workloads (in term of IO patterns, query frequency, dataset structure) plan to split your clusters: the mother of all cluster patterns becomes quite difficult to manage at some point. We today have around 20 clusters for different usages.

• Quick retrieval of data
• Fast upload of data

Vertica was a key component in a billing systems analytic engine. Among other functionalities, the engine is constantly analysing offline usage and sending customers alerts when they exceed certain limits.

It would be hugely beneficial if HP Vertica offered stored procedures.

I have used it for five years.

As a green field solution, the features of the application were not clear and the system integrator was not up to the mark.

We did not encounter hardly any stability issues.

We did not encounter hardly any scalability issues.

It was a green field solution, and getting quick customer service was a challenge.

Technical support is scarce in Australia.

We did not previously use a different solution.

Initial setup is straightforward.

We implemented it through a vendor. The team was good, but they were not experts.

Vertica is an excellent data warehouse platform. Its column-oriented architecture makes it a powerful database specialized for data warehouses. Data should be designed around a star schema.

Data is accessed via SQL, which most developers are already familiar with.

Vertica is "catching on" in the software market, so its user knowledge base is gradually increasing.

The price seems reasonable, the product is reliable, and it uses SQL, so developers don't need to learn a new language.

It provides very fast results for analysts running reports. These reports are crucial to help our clients strategize their targeted marketing.

Vertica is relatively new and needs some polish and refinement, but its core functionality is excellent.

Documentation overall is fair to good; but lacks continuity or cohesiveness in places.

Although its knowledge base is increasing, it is still relatively small, making some issues difficult to diagnose without consulting Vertica Tech Support.

Vertica does not have native stored procedures or a native scripting language. Instead, external functions (which can be called from within Vertica) using Java, C++, Linux shell scripting, etc., are supported. This is an unpleasant surprise for many developers, but I feel this has not been a big hindrance in my experience. Complex business logic probably does not belong in a high-performance data warehouse platform. Rather, this should be taken care of during ETL.

I have 3+ years of experience with Vertica.

Deployment had only a few minor issues that one finds with most software.

It has been very stable.

I would give technical support 8 out of 10. They have been responsive, professional and knowledgeable.

• I have used traditional, row-oriented relational databases like SQL Server, Oracle and PostgreSQL for data warehousing. They are optimized for handling transactions, not data warehousing. Vertica is optimized for data warehousing and that was very clearly demonstrated in its ability to scan large amounts of data at high speed. It is also very fast at loading data.
• Vertica uses a distributed, shared-nothing architecture which allows for nodes to be added (or removed) according to need. This is a very scalable architecture which is very difficult to achieve with traditional row-oriented databases.
• Compared to Hadoop, Hive, and Spark, Vertica is much more adept at handling concurrent users.

Installation is recommended for someone familiar with Linux (the only OS available for Vertica). For developers with a Linux background, the issues are very manageable. Documentation is good for the installation, so follow it carefully, step-by-step.

Implementation was in-house. No significant issues were encountered.

ROI is good because Vertica, while not cheap, is a better performer than traditional databases.

• Understand that its strengths depend on a good data warehouse design using a star schema. It was never intended for high volumes of small, randomly distributed inserts, updates and deletes that are typically found in transactional databases.
• It uses column-oriented architecture. It is important to study aspects of this architecture and to implement them and modify them as the database grows in size and more users access the system. This is especially true for projections, run-length encoding, sorting and column ordering. It is important to understand these aspects in order to truly maximize Vertica's performance.