Vertica Reviews

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.

Vertica is an excellent data warehouse platform. Its column-oriented architecture makes it a powerful database specialized for data warehouses. Data should be designed around a star schema.

Data is accessed via SQL, which most developers are already familiar with.

Vertica is "catching on" in the software market, so its user knowledge base is gradually increasing.

The price seems reasonable, the product is reliable, and it uses SQL, so developers don't need to learn a new language.

It provides very fast results for analysts running reports. These reports are crucial to help our clients strategize their targeted marketing.

Vertica is relatively new and needs some polish and refinement, but its core functionality is excellent.

Documentation overall is fair to good; but lacks continuity or cohesiveness in places.

Although its knowledge base is increasing, it is still relatively small, making some issues difficult to diagnose without consulting Vertica Tech Support.

Vertica does not have native stored procedures or a native scripting language. Instead, external functions (which can be called from within Vertica) using Java, C++, Linux shell scripting, etc., are supported. This is an unpleasant surprise for many developers, but I feel this has not been a big hindrance in my experience. Complex business logic probably does not belong in a high-performance data warehouse platform. Rather, this should be taken care of during ETL.

I have 3+ years of experience with Vertica.

Deployment had only a few minor issues that one finds with most software.

It has been very stable.

I would give technical support 8 out of 10. They have been responsive, professional and knowledgeable.

• I have used traditional, row-oriented relational databases like SQL Server, Oracle and PostgreSQL for data warehousing. They are optimized for handling transactions, not data warehousing. Vertica is optimized for data warehousing and that was very clearly demonstrated in its ability to scan large amounts of data at high speed. It is also very fast at loading data.
• Vertica uses a distributed, shared-nothing architecture which allows for nodes to be added (or removed) according to need. This is a very scalable architecture which is very difficult to achieve with traditional row-oriented databases.
• Compared to Hadoop, Hive, and Spark, Vertica is much more adept at handling concurrent users.

Installation is recommended for someone familiar with Linux (the only OS available for Vertica). For developers with a Linux background, the issues are very manageable. Documentation is good for the installation, so follow it carefully, step-by-step.

Implementation was in-house. No significant issues were encountered.

ROI is good because Vertica, while not cheap, is a better performer than traditional databases.

• Understand that its strengths depend on a good data warehouse design using a star schema. It was never intended for high volumes of small, randomly distributed inserts, updates and deletes that are typically found in transactional databases.
• It uses column-oriented architecture. It is important to study aspects of this architecture and to implement them and modify them as the database grows in size and more users access the system. This is especially true for projections, run-length encoding, sorting and column ordering. It is important to understand these aspects in order to truly maximize Vertica's performance.

In this particular use case, our company is in the media industry and we rely exclusively on Vertica for our analytical and operational reporting requirements.

What I find personally beneficial about Vertica is its ability to scale effortlessly, regardless of the data load. 

In addition, there are several optimization techniques available to fine-tune queries, resulting in faster report generation times compared to any other databases I have worked with.

I appreciate the flexibility offered by Vertica's projections. It allows for modifying the primary projection without altering the tables, which helps to optimize queries without the need to modify the underlying data. 

This feature enables us to fine-tune our queries by modifying different projections, which is highly beneficial.

In my opinion, Vertica's documentation could be improved. Currently, there is not enough documentation available to gain a comprehensive understanding of the platform. Additionally, the community support for Vertica is limited, making it difficult to find assistance or resources when needed.

When it comes to data sharing or desktop usage, Snowflake has an advantage over Vertica and other platforms such as cash. Snowflake provides reporting capabilities to share data between two different accounts, which is not currently available in Vertica. This feature is particularly helpful when sharing data with third-party vendors or clients. However, Vertica does not provide such capabilities, and it is not possible to set up data sharing between two different accounts with just a few clicks, as it is possible in Snowflake.

Vertica is a solution that my team manages.

We have been working with Vertica for a year and a half.

We are currently using version nine, specifically 9.3 or a similar version. We have not yet upgraded to the latest version.

Vertica is always stable.

We have not had any stability issues with Vertica.

Vertica is a scalable solution.

I would rate the scalability an eight or nine out of ten based on the use case that we do.

We are a team that handles operational reporting, and our Vertica implementation is used by thousands of people. However, the team responsible for managing and writing code for Vertica consists of only around ten to twelve people.

I personally have not contacted technical support.

Snowflake is a platform that we use in our company. We have been using this solution for the last six months.

As a user of the platform, I don't engage in Snowflake development directly.

Instead, I use Snowflake as a platform where tables are already set up for me to work with. 

I do not handle any aspects of Snowflake management, such as table creation or sharing configurations, as these are typically set up with minimal clicks. 

My work revolves solely around Vertica, and I am responsible for handling everything related to Vertica.

Regarding the initial setup, I don't have direct involvement in it and cannot provide much comment. It's something that my team handles, and while they found it easy to set up, I don't have many specific insights to share.

Our team handled the deployment, we did it ourselves.

It is not difficult to maintain. 

We have a Database Performance Analyzer (DPA), and we've gained experience over time. I've been handling it for three years now.

I am aware that we have licensed it, but I have no knowledge of its cost. As I am not involved in that area.

We work with both Snowflake and Vertica solutions.

I am exploring the use of both Snowflake and Vertica for various use cases, and I am now evaluating which one would be the best fit for a new use case based on our requirements.

I would recommend using the Database Designer tool to design projections before actively using Vertica, instead of rushing into it like with other databases. Vertica is designed for different use cases, and designing projections beforehand can make things much easier later on. Vertica offers features that we believe people should take advantage of before going into production.

I would rate Vertica an eight out of ten.

It has improved my organization's functionality and performance. 

You don't have any more dependency on the local store. In order to build the on-prem process for Vertica, you need to make a lot of changes and be picky about choosing your hardware for it. On Eon, you just put it on S3, so you're not paying a penny for the stores anymore. That's the good thing about Eon. 

We are looking for a cheaper deployment for the solution. Although we did a lot of benchmarks, like Redshift. We tried Redshift, it didn't work. It didn't work out for us as well.

I have been using Vertica since 2009.

When you're on-prem, you're always worried about losing your nodes. It was hard to restore especially when you have big data.

Scalability has been amazing. We have seen a lot of improvement. We have developers and we have a production demo. We have hosted clusters for customers, we have deployed customer scope. I can scribe them by petabytes. I can scale them by the number of users. It depends on the customers. For one project we can have 15 to 20 consecutive users, but they deal with petabytes of storage.

Their support is really bad. Maybe Micro Focus has changed but they were not good before. They weren't really responsive. We've never had good support.

I would rate it a three out of ten. I met with them two months ago. They asked why we didn't renew our support. They wasted a lot of our money. We've had really bad experiences with Vertica.

We previously used Oracle and we decided to go for big data. 

The initial setup was straightforward for me, it's not complex at all. You need to be at least a bit of a database administrator and really get certified on Vertica in order to use it. 

My advice to someone considering Vertica is to go for it. 

Nothing is missing. I would rate it a ten out of ten.

The only issues are support and the price. 

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 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.