Vertica

Infobox_Company
company_name = Vertica Systems, Inc.
company_
company_type = Private
foundation = 2005
location = Billerica, MA
products = Vertica Analytic Database, Vertica Analytic Database Appliance, Vertica for the Cloud
industry = Enterprise Software & Database Management & Data Warehousing
homepage = [http://www.vertica.com/ www.vertica.com] Vertica Systems is an analytic database management software company ["Network World" staff: "New database company raises funds, nabs ex-Oracle bigwigs”, [http://www.linuxworld.com/news/2007/021407-vertica-oracle.html] "LinuxWorld", February 14, 2007] [ Brodkin, J: "10 enterprise software companies to watch", [http://www.networkworld.com/news/2007/041107-enterprise-software-companies-to-watch.html?page=9] "Network World", April 11, 2007] . 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 warehouses 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. [Monash, C: "Are row-oriented RDBMS obsolete?" [http://www.dbms2.com/2007/01/22/are-row-oriented-rdbms-obsolete/] "DBMS2", January 22, 2007]
* 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.
* Compression, 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. [Monash, C: "Mike Stonebraker on database compression – comments”, [http://www.dbms2.com/2007/03/24/comments-stonebraker-data-compression/] "DBMS2", March 24, 2007]
* Shared nothing architecture, which reduces system contention for shared resources and allows gradual degradation of performance in the face of hardware failure.

The Vertica Analytic Database runs on grids of Linux-based commodity servers. It is also available as an analytic database appliance through HP resellers, and as a hosted DBMS provisioned by and running on the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud.

Several of Vertica’s product innovations were originally prototyped within the C-Store column-oriented database database, an academic open source research project at MIT and other universities.

The overall approach shows promise in significantly increasing query performance in data warehouses. A use case detailed in "One Size Fits All? Part 2: Benchmarking Results" [http://nms.csail.mit.edu/~stavros/pubs/osfa.pdf] (sect. 3.1) shows a performance improvement of hundreds of times with Vertica in a specific application due to the use of the vertical DBMS approach.

Vertica was founded in 2005 by database research and technology pioneer Dr. Michael Stonebraker; and Andrew Palmer, a business executive with experience in both software and biotechnology. Vertica's advistory board includes former Oracle Corporation executives Jerry Held and Ray Lane, as well as "Father of DB2" and former IBM CTO, Don Haderle and former Teradata general manager, Bruce Armstrong.

Sybase Inc. has filed an intellectual property patent infringement lawsuit against Vertica. http://dockets.justia.com/docket/court-txedce/case_no-6:2008cv00024/case_id-107871/

See also

* C-store
* Sybase IQ
* Column-oriented database
* Shared nothing architecture

References

External links

* [http://www.vertica.com Official website]
* [http://www.vertica.com/product/resourcelibrary/comcast Comcast describes its use of Vertica]
* [http://nms.csail.mit.edu/~stavros/pubs/osfa.pdf Paper containing use case]