Vertica Reviews

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.

• Speed
• Parallelization
• SQL language
• High Availability

I have seen queries that take over 24 hours on MS SQL Server to complete, complete in less than 10 minutes on Vertica. I have seen queries that take several minutes, up to an hour, on MS SQL Server, complete in less than 10 seconds, sometime less than one second on Vertica. That allows analysts to spend their time analyzing results instead of waiting for results. Certain types of analysis weren’t even possible before, simply because it took too long.

While the documentation is very extensive and relatively complete, it’s poorly organized and there are way too few examples. It’s come a long way since the first version I saw, but it still has a long way to go. Plus, there is very little information on the internet. I can find a solution to nearly any MS SQL Server problem using Google. Not so for Vertica.

I've been using it for five years. I started with version 4, which was prior to the HP acquisition.

It’s a breeze to setup if you’re using hardware and an OS that meet the minimum requirements. If you try straying from the recommendations, you can find yourself in trouble.

If your queries and projections are optimized properly, it’s rare that you’ll run into stability issues. Stability issues are usually caused by improperly configured hardware/OS, or poorly written queries/projections.

Scalability is great if you size it correctly to start with. Resizing a cluster isn’t for the faint of heart. All the data needs to be redistributed across the cluster when the cluster size changes, and that can take a very long time, depending on how much data you’re storing.

The technical support for Vertica specifically is great. They still have lots of the original (pre-HP acquisition) support people working there who know the product inside and out.

It's pretty straightforward to get the cluster up and running - assuming you follow the vendor recommendations closely. Getting your data in, setting up projections, optimizing queries, etc. is not as straightforward. If you’ve never used it before, save yourself hours of frustration and hire a Vertica consultant.

The first time I used Vertica, we tried doing it ourselves in the beginning. We learned a lot from our failures, but still weren’t getting the results we’d hoped for. After getting professional services help, we were pointed in the right direction, and that made a world of difference. I highly recommend bringing in someone who knows what they’re doing to get you started on the right foot.

It’s expensive, but it’s good once you get it working properly. Like any complicated software product, you’re paying for years of research and development, support, etc. Everyone’s use case is different, and sometimes it’s difficult to put a price on speed. You pay for the storage, not the number of processors or nodes. They have a community edition that allows up to three nodes with up to one TB of storage. You can try it out for free that way, and once you realize how well it works, you can purchase a commercial license as your storage footprint grows.

At a previous company, we looked at Greenplum as an alternative to Vertica. For our specific use-case, Vertica won the majority of our benchmark tests. If we had a design that required lots of updates and deletes, we may have compromised and gone with Greenplum.

How useful it is depends upon your use case. It’s not a be-all and end-all solution, and it’s great for data that doesn’t change. If you have massive fact and dimension tables, and you need to do analytics on them, this is the Cadillac. If you’re trying to replace your OLTP system, there are better suited solutions out there.

These days, there are lots of alternative solutions in the big data space. Open source vs. Commercial. Every imaginable use case. Just like any project, there is the right tool for the job, but you don’t always know what tools are available. You end up using something because it worked before on a different job, or it’s the cheapest solution. Your best bet is always to closely determine your requirements, then find the best match.

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.

It provides very fast query performance after good designs of projections.

It's easy to implement for 24/7 data load and usage because you don’t have to worry about “load time slots” since you can load data into reporting tables at all times without worrying about their query load.

It just keeps up and running all the time.

We have been able to move from nightly batch loads to continuous data flow and usage. This hasn’t happened just because of Vertica, we have renewed our data platform pretty thoroughly, but definitely Vertica is one major part of our new data platform.

We are running our data transformations as an ELT process inside Vertica; we have data at least on the landing area, temporary staging area, and final data model. Data transformations require lots of deletes and updates (which are actually delete/insets in Vertica). Delete in Vertica doesn’t actually delete data from tables, it just marks them as deleted. For us to keep the performance up, purge procedures are needed and a good delete strategy needs to be designed and implemented. This can be time consuming and is a hard task to complete, so more ‘out-of-the-box’ delete strategies would be a nice improvement.

We've been using it since January 2015.

We haven't had any issues with the deployment.

Stability is good, however the database crashed once because a query ran against a large XML data element.

We haven’t yet scaled out our system. So far performance has been good (taking into consideration that delete strategy mentioned in the Areas for Improvement question).

We haven’t needed tech support too much. So far so good.

We used Oracle for our DWH. When selecting a new database, we evaluated -- based both on written documentation and hands-on experimenting -- quite a lot of databases, such as Exadata, Teradata, and IBM Netezza. We selected HP Vertica as it runs on bulk hardware since it has “open interfaces”. It performed really well during hands-on experimenting and its “theories in practice” is good. Performance is excellent, development is easy (however, you need to re-think some things that you may have gotten used to when using other SQL databases), and its license model is simple.

It seemed to be very straightforward. However, we had an experienced consult to do the setup.

We had a joint team consisting of both an in-house team and external consultants. It’s very important to build up the internal knowledge by participating in actual project work.

We have ran so little time in production that we don’t yet have a decent ROI or other calculations done.

The license model of HP Vertica is simple and transparent.

Just go for it and try it out; you can download the free Community edition from the HP Vertica website.

We are resellers and we provide products for our customers.

Our clients are using this solution in two ways; one is for a data warehouse, and the second is for analytics in the database.

The data warehouse has exceedingly high performance and has the ability to do large scale queries very effectively. It fits well in large enterprises.

All features are valuable. It's a combination of capabilities that's all in one place, which is incredibly powerful.

For me, it's performance, scalability, low cost, and it's integrated into enterprise and big data environments.

Some of our small to medium-sized customers would like to see containerization and flexibility from the deployment standpoint. They don't currently offer this as a platform as a service. Snowflake is offering this capability.

They're available in the cloud. They're available on every cloud, but they're not available as a managed platform as a service offering.

We have been dealing with Vertica for two years. 

We use both version 9.3 and version 10. Version 10 is the latest one.

Vertica is a stable solution, it's rock solid. Production workloads being run on it are super steady. It's high availability, massively parallel processing. Nodes go down and you don't even notice.

This is a scalable solution. For example, if we look at Uber drivers, they are able to monitor the position and availability of the drivers and match that against the number of customers for every customer and every driver worldwide globally.

They do a geospatial analysis and calculate their search pricing. They are defined by geographical boundaries, they are defined by where the people are and where the drivers are. This is done for every city in the world for every driver. That gives you an idea of the scale they are able to do in this particular use case.

This gives you the idea of the scale, the performance, and the ability to do analytics in the database. They do this so much more cost-effectively than they would on any other platform.

Technical support is extremely good. They know the product and they're very good.
I don't have any complaints regarding technical support.

Vertica is known for its ease of administration. I would say that the initial setup is easier than most.

The price varies completely. Cost information is available publically where you can compare with other solutions.

From a cost perspective, the software is less than most of its competitors.

Customers save money by a smaller hardware footprint, fewer nodes, less storage, lower-cost storage, and no appliances. So it is typically a lot less money than an Oracle, Teradata, or Snowflake. 

Overall, they are highly competitive when it comes to pricing.

The customers love them. They absolutely love them.

Before implementing this solution, make sure that it is on the list and that you evaluate it.

I would rate Vertica a ten out of ten.

When I have a business need for a few pieces of information, and I need to process it quickly, that's when I use Vertica.

We got something like a six-times improvement using Vertica.

The feature of the product that is most important is the speed. I needed a columnar database, and its speed is what it's built to do, and so that's what really does differentiate Vertica from its competitors.

 I think what also draws me to it is that I don't need any special hardware. So I can use commodity hardware, which is nice to have in a commercial solution.

I think it's starting to get a little expensive. Open source products are starting to get more robust, so I think that's something that they need to start looking at in terms of licensing.

Absolutely stable. It's supported. The stability is one thing, the support is the other thing.

No scalability issues. Like I said, in its competitive set it is just faster, better, depending on how you use it, because it is columnar.

We don't need them that much, but when we do need them, we use the virtual tech support, and that's fine. It works, and it's responsive. Within 24 hours, we get resolution.

We didn't pay for a higher tier of service, but we generally just have questions for support.

We've used Greenplum, Teradata, and then Vertica. We used the big data open source solutions as well that are getting better. So those are the four that I can think of off the top of my head. Greenplum and Teradata are just getting too expensive. 

Particularly compared against its open source set, I think that's really the one key piece where Vertica might have a little bit more ladder room. It was always the leader in terms of pricing against Greenplum and Teradata, so that's why Vertica turned up again for us, but now that the open source solutions are trying to compete a little bit better in terms of stability, that's where we sometimes consider change.

I evaluated Teradata, and another, but I didn't like either of them, not for what we needed.

The pros are, if you have columnar processing, then this is in your top three solutions. I think the con is the software pricing, and licensing needs to start getting more competitive with the open source solutions, or they need to market their stability a lot more.

Test out the solution. Most people who test it buy it. So that's the biggest draw that it has, you can test in a day.

Storage abstraction through projections. It gives you the possibility to react to any kind of query with an optimal performance.

The Workload Analyzer helps you easily to analyze your database workloads and recommends tuning opportunities to maximize the database performance. This in turn reduces your operational costs.

I love the hybrid storage model and due to that the full control of load and query behavior. I also like the ability to read semistructured data with FlexTables for DataExploration.

We are now able to procde real-time insights into our tracking data, and with that show how our customers are using the products that we have. Furthermore, it is now possible for our Data Science department to easily, and quickly train their new data mining models and get answers faster than ever before.

With the hybrid storage model along with well designed resource pools and storage abstraction through projections, we are now able to easily load new data constantly throughout the whole day. While doing this, we can still be available to perform data analytics on new and legacy data quickly, and even Microstrategy for enterprise reporting doesn’t need to cache data. Most reports can be generated with live queries and still finish within seconds.

So in a nutshell:
- Faster Information Insight (Data to Insight cycle)
- Less complexity on data modeling
- Less operational costs

I would love to see direct connections to other DMSs. Something like a direct connector to Oracle, MySQL, MS SQL, MongoDB, etc. so that you can copy data between Vertica and other vendors directly and more easily without an ETL tool, dump, transport, or load data.

I've been using Vertica for two and a half years.

We had an issue caused by adding nodes, but this error was caused by ourselves, as we didn’t use the proper process for adding nodes. That led to some problems that needed to be solved. Even though we did something bad, the instance was still working properly from an outside point of view.

We had to contact support for the above mentioned issues with adding nodes, and some other minor questions. All pf our questions were been answered in an appropriate time, and for the complicated problem we needed to solve, we were provided a direct contact and solved this during a conference call with a technician from Boston. So all in all, I would rate the customer service and technical support team from HPE Vertica as one of the best.

The documentation and install procedures cannot be any more straightforward. You get all the information you need from the documentation in a well structured form. We also got support from Vertica for the first setup. They made hardware configuration suggestions and involved us in any details to help us to understand the overall process. During installation, the scripts were check numerous hardware and software settings to help you achieve the best performance for your environment.

We implemented our first cluster in collaboration with the HPE Vertica team. I would always suggest this step, as you will be able to better understand the details about Vertica and how to operate the system efficiently.

My advice for pricing/licensing/ROI in a "proprietary proprietary“ comparison. You won’t achieve a better cost effectiveness with a different vendor.

We did a PoC between competitors and Vertica. Throughout the whole PoC, Vertica performed much better in terms of its stability, flexibility, performance and ease of use. We didn’t encounter any problems or downsides, and it didn’t matter what we tested. At that stage, just the Management Console had some minor issues, but even those are now fixed and are not important for the core database engine. I would name HPE Vertica as the most mature columnar database with a best of class data storage and query engine.

From the beginning, work closely with HPE Vertica. There's a great Vertica community and a great network to many other companies in the world using this system. Vertica is the most flexible columnar storage with an outstanding performance for any kind of situation.

Fast query processing for historical data analytics. Write Optimized Store (WOS) continuous data loading without drastically impacting performance of OLAP queries. It's one of the few columnar databases that has the capability to provide near real time data delivery for analytics with minimal delay sourcing data from traditional databases or NoSQL data stores or any unstructured data sources.

With traditional RDBMS historical data analysis or any complex queries took minutes to complete. With the addition of Vertica to handle big data queries, these reports are now returned in under 15 seconds. The biggest performance improvements obviously are for queries that have to analyze a large amount of historical data.

Stability, scalability (3 node Community Edition) and backup/restore all need to be worked on. Without proper work load management and resource pool allocation, any batch/ETL or streaming jobs which refreshes data frequently will impair OLAP query performance.

We've been using the three node cluster for about one and a half years.

We had several incidents where SQL queries with UDF predicates would shutdown the cluster or sometimes a single node. We worked with HP support to get these things fixed with subsequent versions of Vertica.

With the Community Edition we are restricted to three nodes. We have a lot of enterprise clients who stress our cluster to its limits. The only advice I would give to new adopters is that if you want superior performance and reliability you are better off going all-in with the enterprise edition and a large number of nodes; assuming you have a lot of clients who run queries concurrently.

Setup and administration are very easy. Vertica was designed to be operational with minimal Database Administrator effort.

We evaluated various other solutions but we chose Vertica because its SQL implementation is very similar to PostgreSQL, and therefore it saved us lot of development time re-writing SQL queries. Vertica seems to be one of the few columnar database which can handle both ETL/Batch jobs and OLAP queries simultaneously. We stream data into Vertica from RDBMS frequently than what is typically recommended for Columnar databases.