Vertica Blog
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James

Vertica Field Chief Technologist

I've had the privilege of working with many database technologies in my career. But after being introduced to Vertica in May of 2011 as a client, I was hooked on the new technology after witnessing a query run in milliseconds that had previously ran for hours on the legacy database we had in place. It was then that I knew I wanted to eventually join the Vertica team, and 4 years later I did! I am currently a Vertica evangelist and am ready to help you get on board! Please feel free to reach out to me with any questions you have about Vertica and make sure to follow my Vertica Quick Tips!

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Quick Tip: Replacing non-UTF-8 Characters

James Knicely, Vertica Field Chief Technologist
July 16, 2021

Vertica database servers expect to receive all data in UTF-8 and Vertica outputs all data in UTF-8. However, you can load or insert data into Vertica that is non UTF-8, but you'll want to clean it up. I used to recommend the REGEXP_REPLACE function for that task, but now there is a better way! Vertica...
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Quick Tip: MC Adds a New Feedback Button

James Knicely, Vertica Field Chief Technologist
July 15, 2021

Do you love Vertica and want to let us know, or want to provide some constructive criticism? Well, now you can easily do that. Starting in Vertica 10.1.x, Management Console added a new Feedback Button which lets you submit a star rating and free-text comments to Vertica. The button displays vertically at the bottom-right of...
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Quick Tip: Determining Database “Cell” Count

James Knicely, Vertica Field Chief Technologist
July 14, 2021

The Vertica system tables LICENSE_AUDITS and USER_AUDITS include a mysterious column called CELL_COUNT. What exactly is the Cell Count? It's simply a calculation that looks like this: DATABASE CELL_COUNT = (Table_1 Column Count * Table_1 Row Count) + (Table_2 Column Count * Table_2 Row Count) + … + (Table_n Column Count * Table_n Row Count)...
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Quick Tip: WITH Clause Recursion

James Knicely, Vertica Field Chief Technologist
June 11, 2021

Starting with version 10.1.x, Vertica supports recursive queries. These are incredibly useful in modeling and working with self-referential hierarchical data. Let's take a look at a natural instance of this form of data: the manager-subordinate relationship. The following table contains employees (EMP_NAME), their IDs (EMP_ID), and the IDs of their managers (EMP_MGR_ID). For example, the...
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Quick Tip: Combine SQL and vsql Meta-commands on the vsql Command Line

James Knicely, Vertica Field Chief Technologist
June 10, 2021

When using vsql, the -c (--command) flag lets you pass a single statement to vsql as a string and then exits. Examples: While you can't combine a SQL statement with a vsql meta-command... ...You can use echo to combine and pipe SQL statements and vsql meta-functions to vsql! Have Fun!
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Quick Tip: Create User-Defined Inverse Hyperbolic Functions

James Knicely, Vertica Field Chief Technologist
May 28, 2021

Vertica includes a ton of built-in mathematical functions to help you on your analytic journey, and creating new ones is quick and easy. Let's create the inverse hyperbolic functions: ACOSH - To compute the inverse (arc) hyperbolic cosine of its argument. ASINH - To compute the inverse (arc) hyperbolic sine of its argument. ATANH -...
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Quick Tip: Create “Super Wide” Tables

James Knicely, Vertica Field Chief Technologist
May 27, 2021

Starting in Vertica 10.1.0, you can go super wide with up to 9,800 column definitions in a table! Prior to Vertica 10.1.x, tables were limited to 1,600 columns. Example Creating a table with 9,800 columns: Hint: Try to avoid running a SELECT * FROM … a table with 9,800 columns and a trillion+ rows 😊...
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Quick Tip: Use a “Seed” Table to Populate a Table with Random Values

James Knicely, Vertica Field Chief Technologist
May 26, 2021

Oftentimes, I need to do some testing with randomly generated data. For instance, if I need to insert a million rows I used to cross join several system tables with one another in an INSERT statement. Method 1 (bad): CROSS JOIN Suppose we need a table full of many random UUIDs. We could do this...
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Quick Tip: EXPORT TO PARQUET Compression with GZIP, Brotli, and ZSTD

James Knicely, Vertica Field Chief Technologist
May 25, 2021

EXPORT TO PARQUET exports a table, columns from a table, or query results to files in the Parquet format. These Parquet files use Snappy compression by default. Starting in Vertica 10.1.1, EXPORT TO PARQUET supports the GZIP, Brotli, and ZSTD compression types! Let’s see how these compression types compare in disk usage: Snappy compression: GZIP...

List the Missing Dates in a Date Series

James Knicely, Vertica Field Chief Technologist
October 22, 2020

The TIMESERIES clause in Vertica makes it easy to list all of the gap days (that is, those that are missing) from a series of dates. Say I have this simple date series: As you can see, there are several dates missing from the series (2020-10-30, 2020-11-02, 2020-11-03 and 2020-11-04). I can list these absent...
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Getting Every Nth Row from a Table (Enhanced)

James Knicely, Vertica Field Chief Technologist
October 20, 2020

In a previous Vertica Quick Tip we learned how to query every Nth row from a table when we had a unique ID column having sequential values (that is, from a sequence). See, https://www.vertica.com/blog/vertica-quick-tip-getting-every-n-th-row-table/ What if we don’t have a key like that in our table? No problem thanks to the ROW_NUMBER() Analytic Function! Say...
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Copy a Table with an Identity to a Table with an Identity on the Same Database Keeping the Identities in Sync

James Knicely, Vertica Field Chief Technologist
May 25, 2020

An IDENTITY associates a table column with a sequence. This sequence automatically increments the column value as new rows are added. There are some noteable restrictions on IDENTITY columns: You cannot INSERT values manually into an IDENTITY column You cannot UPDATE the values of an IDENTITY column once they has been populated via the sequence...