Vertica Blog

Bryan Herger

Vertica Big Data Solution Architect at Micro Focus

My background is analytical chemistry and current interests and work are in finance, adtech, health information, and real-time streaming analytics.

Connect With Bryan on

Disk usage, traffic, and other usage concerns

Diving into Disk Usage

Bryan Herger, Vertica Big Data Solution Architect at Micro Focus
August 6, 2019

Would you like to know how much disk space Vertica is using as it runs? This could be useful for capacity planning, monitoring trends, or debugging. Here are some ways to follow disk usage trends and also look at temporary events like Tuple Mover and Join Spills: Helpful Link: Have fun!

Vintage businessman concept wearing futuristic helmet at office

Find and Fix Issues from Vertica Query Events

Bryan Herger, Vertica Big Data Solution Architect at Micro Focus
August 5, 2019

Vertica offers tools like the Workload Analyzer in Management Console (MC) to tune up a Vertica Cluster, but there's a simple way to find and fix issues that Vertica observes and records if you aren't using MC. The query_events table captures optimization issues and suggests fixes. Let's take a look at my demo cluster, checking...

Streaming Data in One Line!

Bryan Herger, Vertica Big Data Solution Architect at Micro Focus
July 31, 2019

Remember that game show, "Name That Tune", where contestants were challenged to name a tune in as few notes as possible? Today's tip converts that for Vertica Big Data, showing how we can ingest streaming data in just one line! A simple way to stream data is to write CSV rows to a network socket....

Digital image of a trash can made of data points on blue background

Watch those Delete Vectors!

Bryan Herger, Vertica Big Data Solution Architect at Micro Focus
July 30, 2019

Vertica is very good at ingesting data, compressing it, and querying at high speed. The trade-off here is that the data is stored in large block files called ROS containers. These containers can grow to large sizes, sometimes over 10 GB, and this makes it impractical to decompress and edit the files during updates and...

Looking into details of locking

Bryan Herger, Vertica Big Data Solution Architect at Micro Focus
July 23, 2019

(thanks for query and advice) If you have a lot of concurrent queries, especially mixing DDL and DML, you might see lock contention. If you'd like to see how locks interact in your system, the following queries generate a temporary table with Gantt chart to show an ordered list of locks over time: Query (be...

Analyzing JSON Already Loaded into Vertica Regular Tables

Bryan Herger, Vertica Big Data Solution Architect at Micro Focus
July 22, 2019

Vertica flex tables allow you to query data in JSON format. But what if you've imported JSON objects into VARCHAR already? Here's how you can extract the JSON into flex tables without exporting and importing. Let's create a sample table with a JSON column to convert: Now let's create a flex table: Flex tables use...