The latest release of the Vertica analytical database, now OpenTextTM VerticaTM includes a lot of features that Vertica customers have been eagerly awaiting like:
- Resharding the database as needed
- Rollback snapshots that capture a moment in time without a whole other data copy
- Workload routing so you can automate directing specific queries to just the right compute for that type of job.
- And more …
Plus, there’s a new VerticaPyLab that lets you download Vertica Community Edition, and all other necessary dependencies at once. It provides you with a snazzy new JupyterLab interface to get started doing data science with Vertica in minutes.
The first thing you’re likely to notice is that the version system has changed. The last Vertica release was 12.0.4, so it would be reasonable to expect version 13 about now. However, OpenText acquired Micro Focus, including Vertica, earlier this year. Vertica is now part of the OpenText Analytics and AI business unit of OpenText, with includes Vertica, Magellan BI and Reporting, IDOL large language model-based unstructured data analysis tool, and LegalTech for legal data discovery. OpenText product releases are times to come out one per quarter every year, and numbered according to the year and quarter, hence this is the third quarter of 2023, so the new release is 23.3.
Management Console and other visual aspects of Vertica have also changed colors and logos to match the new company’s brand guidelines. Beyond the cosmetic changes, and even beyond the improvements you expect in performance and security in every Vertica release, this release has some major new capabilities.
The big news is the addition of read and analysis on external data using Apache Iceberg. This last piece of the puzzle makes Vertica a fully functional data lakehouse. Do standard business intelligence, machine learning, geospatial, event pattern matching, and time series data analysis using structured data or data lake formats like Parquet, JSON, and ORC – all with Vertica. Analyze data lake data at data warehouse speed.
Analyzing data lake formats with Vertica, through the Apache Iceberg metadata layer, gives you the advantage of ACID compliance and rapid findability of data in the lake. No more going fishing in the swamp. If another application or query engine alters that data, Iceberg keeps track of changes like new or removed columns, or changed data types, and makes that information available to Vertica when you do your next analysis.
Vertica’s focus on performance at scale makes queries on that data exceptionally fast now, and each new release will push the response speed for the query integration with Iceberg to the next level.
There are a ton of other improvements like adding users on the fly using Oauth tokens, breaking long queries into parts so they execute faster with less compute, multi-step ML pipelines or database maintenance routines with nested stored procedures, and a lot more.
Read more on the What’s New in OpenText Vertica 23.3 post on the OpenText blog.
Or get all the details in the OpenText Vertica Release Notes in the documentation.
About the Author
Paige Roberts
Vertica Open Source Relations Manager
In over two decades in the data management industry, I have worked as an engineer, a trainer, a marketer, a product manager, and a consultant. Contributor to O'Reilly's 97 Things Every Data Engineer Should Know. Now, I promote understanding of Vertica, MPP data processing, open source, high scale data engineering, and how the analytics revolution is changing the world.
