Vertica
Encyclopedia
Vertica Systems is an analytic
database management
software company. Vertica was founded in 2005 by database researcher Michael Stonebraker
, and Andrew Palmer; its President and CEO is Christopher P. Lynch
. HP announced it would acquire the company in February 2011. On March 22, 2011, HP completed its acquisition of Vertica. The acquisition expands HP’s information optimization, business intelligence and analytics portfolio for enterprise companies and the public sector.
s and other query-intensive applications. Its design features include:
Vertica's specialized approach aims to significantly increase query performance in data warehouses. One example of a use case detailed in a research paper shows a performance improvement of hundreds of times with Vertica in a specific application due to the use of the vertical DBMS approach. For example, Vertica would sort and index the data which may shorten run times of some queries.
of Linux
-based commodity servers
. It is also available as a hosted DBMS provisioned by and running on the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud. It has integration with Hadoop
.
The MicroStrategy
business intelligence
platform is optimized for the Vertica database through Vertica-specific SQL syntax.
Several of Vertica’s features were originally prototyped within the C-Store
column-oriented database, an academic open source
research project at MIT and other universities.
.
Analytics
Analytics is the application of computer technology, operational research, and statistics to solve problems in business and industry. Analytics is carried out within an information system: while, in the past, statistics and mathematics could be studied without computers and software, analytics has...
database management
Database management system
A database management system is a software package with computer programs that control the creation, maintenance, and use of a database. It allows organizations to conveniently develop databases for various applications by database administrators and other specialists. A database is an integrated...
software company. Vertica was founded in 2005 by database researcher Michael Stonebraker
Michael Stonebraker
Michael Ralph Stonebraker is a computer scientist specializing in database research.Through a series of academic prototypes and commercial startups, Stonebraker's research and products are central to many relational database systems on the market today...
, and Andrew Palmer; its President and CEO is Christopher P. Lynch
Christopher P. Lynch
Christopher P. Lynch currently serves as the Vice President and General Manager of Hewlett Packards' Database Business Unit, a role he accepted after the acquisition by HP of his latest start-up endeavor Vertica Systems in February 2011. Mr. Lynch was tapped by Vertica’s investors in 2010 to...
. HP announced it would acquire the company in February 2011. On March 22, 2011, HP completed its acquisition of Vertica. The acquisition expands HP’s information optimization, business intelligence and analytics portfolio for enterprise companies and the public sector.
Products
The grid-based, column-oriented, Vertica Analytic Database is designed to manage large, fast-growing volumes of data and provide very fast query performance when used for data warehouseData warehouse
In computing, a data warehouse is a database used for reporting and analysis. The data stored in the warehouse is uploaded from the operational systems. The data may pass through an operational data store for additional operations before it is used in the DW for reporting.A data warehouse...
s and other query-intensive applications. Its design features include:
- Column-oriented storage organization, which increases performance of sequential record access at the expense of common transactional operations such as single record retrieval, updates, and deletes.
- Out-of-place updates and hybrid storage organization, which increase the performance of queries, insertions, and loads, but at the expense of updates and deletes.
- CompressionData compressionIn computer science and information theory, data compression, source coding or bit-rate reduction is the process of encoding information using fewer bits than the original representation would use....
, which reduces storage costs and I/O bandwidth. High compression is possible because columns of homogeneous datatype are stored together and because updates to the main store are batched. - Shared nothing architectureShared nothing architectureA shared nothing architecture is a distributed computing architecture in which each node is independent and self-sufficient, and there is no single point of contention across the system...
, which reduces system contention for shared resources and allows gradual degradation of performance in the face of hardware failure.
Vertica's specialized approach aims to significantly increase query performance in data warehouses. One example of a use case detailed in a research paper shows a performance improvement of hundreds of times with Vertica in a specific application due to the use of the vertical DBMS approach. For example, Vertica would sort and index the data which may shorten run times of some queries.
Optimizations
The Vertica Analytic Database runs on gridsGrid computing
Grid computing is a term referring to the combination of computer resources from multiple administrative domains to reach a common goal. The grid can be thought of as a distributed system with non-interactive workloads that involve a large number of files...
of Linux
Linux
Linux is a Unix-like computer operating system assembled under the model of free and open source software development and distribution. The defining component of any Linux system is the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released October 5, 1991 by Linus Torvalds...
-based commodity servers
Commodity computing
Commodity computing is to use large numbers of already available computing components for parallel computing to get the greatest amount of useful computation at low cost. It is computing done in commodity computers as opposed to high-cost supermicrocomputers or boutique computers...
. It is also available as a hosted DBMS provisioned by and running on the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud. It has integration with Hadoop
Hadoop
Apache Hadoop is a software framework that supports data-intensive distributed applications under a free license. It enables applications to work with thousands of nodes and petabytes of data...
.
The MicroStrategy
MicroStrategy
MicroStrategy, Inc. , is a business intelligence software vendor. MicroStrategy's software enables leading organizations worldwide to analyze the vast amounts of data stored across their enterprises to make more strategic business decisions...
business intelligence
Business intelligence
Business intelligence mainly refers to computer-based techniques used in identifying, extracting, and analyzing business data, such as sales revenue by products and/or departments, or by associated costs and incomes....
platform is optimized for the Vertica database through Vertica-specific SQL syntax.
Several of Vertica’s features were originally prototyped within the C-Store
C-Store
C-Store was a database management system based on a column-oriented DBMS developed by a team at Brown University, Brandeis University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, including Michael Stonebraker, Stanley Zdonik, and Samuel Madden ....
column-oriented database, an academic open source
Open source
The term open source describes practices in production and development that promote access to the end product's source materials. Some consider open source a philosophy, others consider it a pragmatic methodology...
research project at MIT and other universities.
Company events
In January 2010, it was reported that Vertica won the claims construction hearing, successfully defending itself from a January 2008 patent-infringement lawsuit filed by SybaseSybase
Sybase, an SAP company, is an enterprise software and services company offering software to manage, analyze, and mobilize information, using relational databases, analytics and data warehousing solutions and mobile applications development platforms....
.
See also
- C-storeC-StoreC-Store was a database management system based on a column-oriented DBMS developed by a team at Brown University, Brandeis University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, including Michael Stonebraker, Stanley Zdonik, and Samuel Madden ....
- Column-oriented database
- MapReduceMapReduceMapReduce is a software framework introduced by Google in 2004 to support distributed computing on large data sets on clusters of computers. Parts of the framework are patented in some countries....
- Shared nothing architectureShared nothing architectureA shared nothing architecture is a distributed computing architecture in which each node is independent and self-sufficient, and there is no single point of contention across the system...
- Sybase IQSybase IQSybase IQ is a relational database software system used for business intelligence and data warehousing, produced by Sybase.-Features:As a column-oriented DBMS, Sybase IQ stores data tables as sections of columns of data rather than as rows of data...