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Introduction to Vertica Database

What is Vertica Analytic Database?

  • Vertica Analytic Database is designed to manage large, fast growing volume of data.
  • Vertica was developed by Vertica Systems. It was founded in 2005 by database researcher Michael Stonebraker and Andrew Palmer.
  • Vertica was acquired by Hewlett Packard in March 2011
  • Vertica Analytic Database is an innovative, ground-up implementation of a relational database management systems optimized for read-intensive workloads.
  • Vertica provides extremly fast ad hoc SQL query performance, even for very large database, making it well suited for:
    • Data warehousing
    • Data marts
    • Fraud detection
    • Call detail analysis
    • Business intelligence
    • Other query intensive applications. 
Why to use Vertica?

By this time i guess you all would be able to say- Why should we user Vertica? This answer is pretty simple- Performance

The key reasons for Vertica's performance are mentioned below: 
  • Vertica organizes data on disk as columns of values from the same attribute.This means when a query needs to access only a few columns of a particular table, only those columns need to be read from disk. Convesely, in a row oriented database like Oracle, MySQL, IBM DB2 all columns in a table are typically read from disk, which wastes I/O bandwidth.

  •  Vertica employs aggressive compression of data on disk, as well as a query execution engine that is able to keep data compressed while it is operated on. Compression in Vertica is particularly effective, as values within a column tend to be quite similar to each other and compress very well- often upto 90% . Whereas in a traditional row-oriented database, values within a row of a table are not likely to be very similar, and hence are unlikely to compress well. 

  • As the dats is compressed so aggressively , Vertica has sufficient space to store multiple copies of the data to ensure fault tolerance and to improve concurrent and ad-hoc query performace. Logical tables are decomposed and physically stored as overlapping groups of columns called "projections". and each projection is sorted on a different attribute, which optimizes them for answering queries with predicates on its sort attributes.

Vertica Database is composed of these query-optimized structures on disk, without the overhead of base tables. It's similar in concept to a database made entirely of materialized views (with no base tables)

 Next we will understand the Vertica Approach..
 

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