Vertica Reviews

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.

The compute and processing engine returns the queries fast and let us use our analysis resources in a better utilization.

The concurrency got better in this version and we are able to run more queries and load concurrently.

We built an internal dashboard using the MicroStrategyto increase visibility to our management and our employees. Also, we built tool to expose the data to our selected partners and users to create better engagement with our platform.

• Loading times for “real time” sources - for example, loading from Spark creates a load on the DB at high scale
• Connectors to other sources such as Kafka or AWS Kinesis
• Better monitoring tools
• Better integration with cloud providers - we were missing some documentation regarding running Vertica on AWS

We've been using Vertica for a year.

In case of one HD failure in the cluster, the entire cluster got slower. We feel that it should be able to handle such issues.

No.

The support was slow and didn’t provide a solution in most cases. The community proved to be the better source for knowledge and problem solving.

Pretty straightforward, the installation was simple and we added more nodes easily as we grew.

Vertica is pretty expensive, take into account the servers and network costs before committing.

We evaluated both AWS Redshift and Google BigQuery.

Redshift didn’t fulfill our expectations regarding query latency at high scale (over 60 TB). Regarding BigQuery, we found the pricing structure pretty complex (payment per query and data processed) and harder to control.

Don't plan a production usage on high-scale straight on Vertica, use caching or other buffers between the users and the DB. Get yourself familiar with the DB architecture before planing your model (specifically, make sure you know ROS/WOS and projections). Try to avoid LAP before your schema gets stabilized.

Analytic functions.

We are trying to data mine customer event data. Having the ability invoke analytic functions without having write self join SQL statements ... just brilliant.

Ability to use analytic functions in where clauses, being able to use aliases in the where and order by clauses will make query writing/reading a lot easier.

2 years.

Columnar data store

Add geospatial indexes (sounds like they have done it in version 8.0)

No

No

No

Above average

Setup was very simple

We use this solution as our data warehouse. It handles our analytics and we have power users connected.

Eighty percent of the ETL operations have improved since implementing this solution. Complex queries are challenging to improve.

This most valuable feature is the database designer, which helps significantly improve our storage footprint.

There is serious performance degradation for large datasets. Fact-to-fact joins on multi-billion record tables perform poorly. Star schema joins also perform poorly if the fact tables reach more than one billion records and the dimension tables reach more than one million records.

• 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.