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Sr. Business Intelligence Analyst / Developer at DXC
Real User
Has improved the majority of our ETL operations, but performance degrades seriously for large datasets
Pros and Cons
  • "Eighty percent of the ETL operations have improved since implementing this solution."
  • "Fact-to-fact joins on multi-billion record tables perform poorly."

What is our primary use case?

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

How has it helped my organization?

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

What is most valuable?

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

What needs improvement?

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.

Buyer's Guide
Vertica
January 2025
Learn what your peers think about Vertica. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: January 2025.
838,713 professionals have used our research since 2012.

For how long have I used the solution?

Two years.
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
PeerSpot user
Hewlett Packard Enterprise Solution Architect at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
Consultant
It leverages machine learning and predictive analytic features to help preprocess data
Pros and Cons
  • "It maximize cloud economics for mission-critical big data analytical initiatives."
  • "It maximizes cloud economics with Eon Mode by scaling cluster size to meet variable workload demands."
  • "It needs integration with multiple clouds."

What is our primary use case?

The primary use case is as an analytics database on EC2 instances.

How has it helped my organization?

  • We gain insights into data in real-time with blazing, fast SQL analytics across exabytes of data.
  • It maximizes cloud economics with Eon Mode by scaling cluster size to meet variable workload demands.
  • It leverages machine learning and predictive analytic features to help preprocess data.

What is most valuable?

It maximize cloud economics for mission-critical big data analytical initiatives.

What needs improvement?

It needs integration with multiple clouds.

For how long have I used the solution?

One to three years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

I have implemented it on Amazon EC2 instances with medium IT workloads.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

It has an elastic scalability solution.

How was the initial setup?

It is easy to integrate with EC2 instances.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

It is fast to purchase through the AWS Marketplace.

The pricing and licensing depend on the size of your environment and the zone where you want to implement.

What other advice do I have?

It is a complete solution and a also good solution for EC2 instances.

I have not tried to integrate it with other products.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
Buyer's Guide
Vertica
January 2025
Learn what your peers think about Vertica. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: January 2025.
838,713 professionals have used our research since 2012.
it_user158742 - PeerSpot reviewer
Director of Software Development at a tech company with 501-1,000 employees
Vendor
It is scalable and worth the expense if you need the production capability that it can support.

What is most valuable?

It has a very good design with high query performance. It provides the scale out capability by adding additional servers instead of scaling up the servers.

How has it helped my organization?

It has provided much better performance than SQL Server for big data analytics.

What needs improvement?

I would like to see integration with the latest Hadoop ecosystem.

For how long have I used the solution?

We have used this solution for three years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

It is usually very stable, but we occasionally see some nodes going down.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

There have not been any scalability issues. We are able to support trillions of data elements by adding more servers.

How are customer service and technical support?

The technical support is pretty good. I would give it a rating of 9/10.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

We used to use MS SQL Server. It is good for data transactions, but it is not good for big data analytics.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

It is pretty expensive, but it is worth it if you need the production capability that it can support.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

We evaluated SQL Server and Teradata.

What other advice do I have?

It is worth a try if you are looking to provide a high-performance, big data analytics database.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
it_user567630 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Vice President Data at Adform
Consultant
Ad-hoc data analysis improved the SLAs for our end clients.

What is most valuable?

The most valuable feature in the solution is ad hoc data analysis. It improved the SLAs for our end clients.

What needs improvement?

There are some predictive analytics features that we might be using which we thought were part of IDOL, but it seems some are also already part of Vertica.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

The stability is super good, especially when you scale out.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

Before using Vertica, we used to have problems scaling out because we increase our customer base significantly each year. We have more than 20.000 clients now. Since we implemented the Vertica solution, it is much less effort to maintain scalability.

How are customer service and technical support?

I haven’t used technical support, but the IT colleagues definitely have. I think they are rather happy with it. I haven't heard any complaints. It could be quicker sometimes, but that's always the case with big processes.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

Previously, we were basically using an old school setup based on a relational database. I’m not sure which database management system it was.

The performance of the previous solution was no longer adequate to support the growth we were seeing in our business. Response times were up to 10-15 seconds on different queries. We needed to get that down to under a second.

Now we’ve moved to a real big data analytics solution.

How was the initial setup?

I wasn’t involved with that, but I think that those who did it were happy with the support.

What other advice do I have?

When we chose a solution, we were looking at scalability, maintenance, and ease of use. With Vertica, we can access big data using regular SQL queries.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
it_user515835 - PeerSpot reviewer
Solution Engineering and Arcitect - Big Data, Data Science and Cloud Computing at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Real User
It delivers speed and performance in query response time. Complicated multi-table queries perform well.

What is most valuable?

Speed and performance: Vertica stands top among its peers in the MPP world, delivering unparalleled speed and performance in query response time. Its distributed architecture and use of projection (materialized version of data) beats most of its competitors.

How has it helped my organization?

This product is used for in-database analytics for reports and queries that require very fast response times. Complicated multi-table queries perform very well, and the company has improved on business operations looking at hot data from various dimensions.

What needs improvement?

Projections take up a lot of space and hence, compression can be improved. Installation can be more intuitive via a simple, lightweight web client instead of the command line.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have used it for two years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

While Vertica is otherwise stable, sometimes there are issues with restores to the last checkpoint.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

I have not encountered any scalability issues.

How are customer service and technical support?

Technical support is very good and knowledgeable.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

I previously used Postgres; switched as performance suffered due to data growth.

How was the initial setup?

Initial setup was straightforward through the command line.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

Negotiate; with HDFS, storage is cheap. Vertica charges per terabyte of compressed data. But the underlying architecture materializes data in a different order and hence space utilization is always heavy, even for a single table; add to that the replication factor.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

Before choosing this product, we evaluated Netezza and ParAccel.

What other advice do I have?

Make sure the data and table structures are compact. Vertica will create many versions of the same data as a projection and isolated tables will increase size, increasing licensing cost.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
System Architect at a comms service provider with 10,001+ employees
Real User
We can quickly identify with the root cause analysis where trends are.

Valuable Features:

We're just now getting into Vertica, but it allows us to store and access big data very quickly. It comes down to being able to quickly identify where the root cause analysis is and where trends are, so you can actually try to almost predict where problems are before they really become a problem.

Improvements to My Organization:

The ability to access in-store, big data, and be able to create keywords for faster resolution and look up an individual, hey we did this problem before. It'll show you all the steps and everything, along with different products. Vertica is pretty much the database behind it. It really does the performance aspect of it.

Room for Improvement:

I guess really the only thing there is if you get a server big enough to handle Vertica, it does just fine. If you're working in a small business, it will tend to overtake most of their budget from a cost perspective because you need so many servers, so much storage, to be able to handle all that stuff.

Stability Issues:

It's very stable.

Initial Setup:

We had no issues deploying it.

Other Solutions Considered:

I did not really look at any competition. Basically, it's like I said, we're an HP shop and a lot of their applications are going to a Vertica database for its storage and processing of data. We were doing a lot of Oracle, but Oracle was actually moving towards Vertica in our environment.

Other Advice:

Make sure you understand how much data that you're going to be incorporating into the big data, so you can actually define the amount of storage and redundant storage appropriately.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
it_user417525 - PeerSpot reviewer
Software Engineer at a marketing services firm with 51-200 employees
Vendor
Having projections as a parallel for indexes in a simple MySQL helped keep our data access fast and optimized. More insight into what the product is doing would help debugging.

What is most valuable?

Having projections as a parallel for indexes in a simple MySQL helped keep our data access fast and optimized.

How has it helped my organization?

This product has enabled us to keep very large amounts of data at hand for fast querying. With enough hardware force behind it, we were able to use Vertica as our primary reporting database without having to aggregate data, thus enabling us to provide many reports without having duplicated data or large aggregation steps.

What needs improvement?

We would like to see better documentation and examples as well as further simplicity in creating clusters, adding nodes, etc. I understand the GUI is very simple but sometimes more insight into what the product is doing and where errors are occurring would help debugging.

For how long have I used the solution?

We have used HP Vertica for three years.

What was my experience with deployment of the solution?

We have found multiple issues with deployment. Deployment was by far the hardest step in the process. We have very little knowledge of how to set up projects, how they affect query times, and how much additional storage they require.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

We have had no stability issues.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

Scalability was a problem given we had to host the solution ourselves. It would be great to have a cloud-based solution around Vertica. Also, we found it difficult to modify and update our schema as we grew. Part of the problem may have been that when we first started using Vertica we were inexperienced.

How are customer service and technical support?

We paid for technical support for one year but did not use it very much so we discontinued its use.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

Choosing Vertica was the first time we used a data warehouse solution for handling the large amounts of data we were starting to gather. Since then, we have switched from an internally hosted Vertica to Spark managed externally.

How was the initial setup?

The initial setup was complex.

What about the implementation team?

We implemented it in-house. I would advise anyone to use a vendor unless you have an in-house expert.

What was our ROI?

I do not have an ROI. It is fair to say that we could not have provided our product to customers without Vertica.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

I found paying for the amount of storage we used simple. It was a surprise because we underestimated how much storage projections use and definitely did not purchase the correct license for the amount of data we estimated we would be handling.

What other advice do I have?

The product is great to use, but there is a steep learning curve initially. Also, we found limited resources for basic operations such as setup and deployment. Most tutorials and documentation were regarding how to run queries and use external tools such as Pentaho, which we weren’t using. We just wanted good explanations of how to optimize using projections, etc. I think it can be a great product if used correctly and implemented by a team who is familiar with the product.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
PeerSpot user
Senior Product Manager (Data Infrastructure) and Security Researcher at a tech company
Vendor
Great Platform

If you are in the topic of Databases, you should know who is Dr. Michael Stonebraker, who is right now an adjunct professor in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, considered like one of the world experts in this field. Why I began in that way? Because Dr. Stonebraker co-founded Vertica Systems, seeing the innovation behind this amazing product.

But, What is Vertica?

Vertica Analytic Database is a high performance MPP (Massive Parallel Processing) columnar engine optimized to deliver faster query results in the shortest time. I said optimized because this is a keyword inside the Vertica team: every piece of code in Vertica has a lot of research and innovation, which I will discuss later. I heard abut this database when I was writing a research paper for my organization about MPP systems, and I found that Vertica was one of the good players in this Big Data Analytics game (the other good players are the Greenplum Database and Teradata’s Aster Data Platform). Then, HP saw the great opportunity that this product represented for the Big Data business and acquired the company in 2011.

OK, let’s talk now about some of the Vertica’s features

  • Column-based storage:

    Vertica use a patented architecture called FlexStoreTM, created based on three principles: the grouping of multiples columns in a single file, the selection of disk storage format based on data load patterns automatically, and the ability to differentiate storage media by their performance characteristics and to enable intelligent placement of data based on usage patterns

  • Advanced Data compression:

    Based on the choosed architecture by Vertica team of grouping columns in a single file; the data compression follows the same principle: Vertica organizes values of similar data types contiguously in memory and on disk, enabling to select the best compression algorithm depending of the data type. This improves dramatically the query execution and parallel load times

  • Built-in Analytics functions:

    Vertica comes with a completed packages of useful functions for Analytics, divided by topics like Natural Language Processing, Data Mining, Logistic Regression, etc. This is called User-Defined Extensions. You can read more about this here in this whitepaper

  • Automatic High Availability:

    Vertica allows to scale your data almost without limits, with remarkable features like automatic failover and redundancy, fast recovery, and fast query performance, executing queries 50x-1000x faster eliminating costly disk I/O.

  • Native integration with Hadoop, BI and ETL tools:

    Seamless integration with a robust and ever growing ecosystem of analytics solutions.

You can read deeply about all these features here. The last version of the platform is Vertica 6, and here you can find some of the new features and improvements in this version, or you can view this video, where Luis Maldonado, Director of Product Management at Vertica, explaining a quick overview of this version.

Ok, it’s a great platform, but who are using it today?

There are a lot of companies that are trusting in Vertica today: Twitter, Zynga (th number # 1 company in the Social Gaming industry), Groupon, JPMorgan Chase, Mozilla, AT&T, Verizon, Diio, Capital IQ, Guess Inc,and many more. Read its testimonials here.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
Buyer's Guide
Download our free Vertica Report and get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions.
Updated: January 2025
Buyer's Guide
Download our free Vertica Report and get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions.