Vertica Reviews

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.

We are using Vertica for dashboards, storing, retrieving, and processing data.

The most valuable feature of Vertica is the unmatchable database performance at a fraction of cost compared to other similar databases.

Vertica can improve automation and documentation.

I have been using Vertica for approximately seven years.

Vertica is stable. They have made improvements in this area but can still improve.

The scalability of Vertica is good.

We have approximately 100 users using this solution.

The support from Vertica is good, they are knowledgeable. However, sometimes there are some challenges when escalating our issue.

I have previously used Teradata long time ago. The price of Teradata was very high and hardware is vendor specific. Vertica can operate on comodity hardware and therefore easily scalable.

The initial setup of Vertica is straightforward.

The price of Vertica is less expensive than some competitors, such as Teradata.

We require one person for maintenance for the 100 users we have.

I rate Vertica an eight out of ten.

We hold financed data on the Vertica database, and clients use the data for reporting and other purposes.

Vertica provides benefits to our customers and helps with their performance.

The most valuable feature is Vertica's performance and the ease of using the database. Also, it is great for partnering with data.

We faced some challenges when trying to use the temporary tables feature. First, we installed Vertica on the AWS cloud and tried to read the data from Bitbucket to Vertica. We were able to read the data, but when we were trying to transform the data and load it into Vertica physical tables, we experienced performance issues.

Regarding additional features, we are unsure if Vertica has updated its features, but we've experienced difficulty in integrating with third-party tools. Clients use multiple technologies and value that integration. Sharing data with third parties should also be improved.

We have been using this solution for two years and are using the latest version.

It is a stable solution.

It is a scalable solution. Initially, we had issues with the scalability, but with the new version, Vertica resolved the issues.

Regarding how many users are using this solution, I do not have a specific number, but our organization is large. So, for example, in a unit with about fifteen clients, two to three clients use Vertica.

I rate this solution a seven out of ten.

Snowflake claims to have many more features than Vertica, but we cannot compare both solutions as we have not used Snowflake. However, if Vertica integrates the use of third-party tools, it would be great and more competitive.

We push both raw and modeled data into a Vertica cluster. It is used mainly for internal analysis and Tableau reports by data scientists and analysts.

It is tremendously scalability, with excellent performance. Vertica gives knowledgeable users and DBAs excellent tools for tuning.

• Its projections and encoding are excellent tools for tuning large volumes.
• The product is simple and elegant.
• It has excellent written documentation. I am able to answer any question by querying on Google.

You need to know what you are doing to get the most out of Vertica. If you do not utilize the tuning tools like projections, encoding, partitions, and statistics, then performance and scalability will suffer.

It would be great if this were a managed service in AWS.

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.

We're just now getting into Vertica, but it allows us to store and access big data very quickly. It comes down to being able to quickly identify where the root cause analysis is and where trends are, so you can actually try to almost predict where problems are before they really become a problem.

The ability to access in-store, big data, and be able to create keywords for faster resolution and look up an individual, hey we did this problem before. It'll show you all the steps and everything, along with different products. Vertica is pretty much the database behind it. It really does the performance aspect of it.

I guess really the only thing there is if you get a server big enough to handle Vertica, it does just fine. If you're working in a small business, it will tend to overtake most of their budget from a cost perspective because you need so many servers, so much storage, to be able to handle all that stuff.

It's very stable.

We had no issues deploying it.

I did not really look at any competition. Basically, it's like I said, we're an HP shop and a lot of their applications are going to a Vertica database for its storage and processing of data. We were doing a lot of Oracle, but Oracle was actually moving towards Vertica in our environment.

Make sure you understand how much data that you're going to be incorporating into the big data, so you can actually define the amount of storage and redundant storage appropriately.

Primary use case is advanced analytics over huge amounts of data. Vertica provides high speed access to high volumes.

Previous to Vertica, some analysis could not be made because of the amount of data needed. Vertica allowed us to take those volumes and process them at a very high speed.

Vertica's most outstanding features are the compression rates achieved and the speed of access of high volume data.

• Support is an area where it could get better. 
• Promotion/marketing must be improved, even though it is a very useful product at very good price, it is not as "popular" as it should be.

One to three years.

Just some issues with clustering, but they were not Vertica's issues.

None.

It could be improved.

Positive

I used Hadoop as the first approach. However, Vertica provided the best of both worlds (huge amounts of data and speed of access for analytics).

Once you got your cluster setup and nodes properly working, it is very simple to set up Vertica.

We did the implementation ourselves.

Huge. We are doing analytics that previously we could not.

We evaluated Exasol, but it came out to be too expensive for the use case.

Do a good volumetric analysis to manage the storage needed.

I am using Vertica for aggregations and dashboards.

The most valuable feature of Vertica is the ability to receive large aggregations at a very quick pace. The use case of subclusters is very good.

I have been using Vertica for three and a half years.

Over the last few months with the new release of Vertica, there have been stability problems. The performance should improve.

Vertica seems to scale well, except for one use case where you are on a multi-node cluster. For example, if you had a nine-node cluster, one node goes down, then the eight nodes don't scale, because the absence of the node is very apparent, which is a problem. If you have nine nodes or multiple nodes, the whole idea is that if one of those nodes goes down, then you should not see an impact on the system if you have enough capacity. Even though we have enough capacity, you can still see the impact of the one node going down.

We have approximately 25 people using this solution in my company. Most of the users are developers. We have been increasing usage of the solution.

The technical support from Vertica is good, but the fixes take a long time if there is a problem.

I rate the support of Vertica a three out of five.

I have not used another similar solution to Vertica.

We had assistance from Vertica with the implementation of the solution.

I would advise others to try the solution out.

I rate Vertica a seven out of ten.