Vertica Blog

Jim Knicely

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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Exiting a DbVisualizer Script Following an Error: Quick Tip

Jim Knicely, Vertica Field Chief Technologist
September 19, 2018

After reading yesterday’s Vertica Quick Tip “Exiting a vsql Script Following an Error”, a client asked if the ON_ERROR_STOP variable is available in the popular third party Vertica client tool DbVisualizer. The answer to that is no, as ON_ERROR_STOP is a Vertica vsql client specific setting. However, many clients, including DbVisualizer, have a similar feature!...

Database and Node Uptime: Quick Tip

Jim Knicely, Vertica Field Chief Technologist
September 10, 2018

You can query the DATABASES system table to find out the last time your Vertica database started and you can get the cluster node up times by querying the NODE_STATES system table. dbadmin=> SELECT node_name, MAX(event_timestamp) node_uptime dbadmin-> FROM node_states dbadmin-> WHERE node_state = 'UP' dbadmin-> GROUP BY node_name dbadmin-> ORDER BY node_name; node_name |...

Mimicking Enumerated Types: Quick Tip

Jim Knicely, Vertica Field Chief Technologist
September 6, 2018

I used to work a lot with MySQL. It had a cool data type called "Enumerated Types". Example in MySQL: How do we do this in Vertica? With a Check Constraint! Example in Vertica: Helpful link: Have fun!

Changing the Field Separator in VSQL: Quick Tip

Jim Knicely, Vertica Field Chief Technologist
September 5, 2018

vsql is a character-based, interactive, front-end utility that lets you type SQL statements and see the results. It’s very common to want to export data in CSV (Comma-Separated Values) format. To do that you can change the default | (vertical bar) field separator to a comma via the fieldsep option of the pset meta-command. Wait...

Monitoring Resource Pool Cascade Events: Quick Tip

Jim Knicely, Vertica Field Chief Technologist
September 4, 2018

You can define secondary resource pools to which running queries can cascade if they exceed the initial pool's RUNTIMECAP. The RESOURCE_POOL_MOVE System Table displays the cascade event information on each node. There you can find helpful information like the source and target pools and why the cascading event occurred! Helpful link: Have fun!

Displaying the Current Schema

Jim Knicely, Vertica Field Chief Technologist
August 8, 2018

Each user session has a search path of schemas. Vertica uses this search path to find tables and user-defined functions (UDFs) that are unqualified by their schema name. You can use the CURRENT_SCHEMA function to display the name of the current schema (i.e., the first “valid” schema in the user’s search path). dbadmin=> SHOW search_path;...
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Vertica Quick Tip: Empty String Vs. NULL

Jim Knicely, Vertica Field Chief Technologist
May 30, 2018

An empty string ('') is treated as a NULL value in Oracle, while in Vertica an empty string is not treated as a NULL value. So when using Vertica, if you want to indicate that a column value is unknown, be sure to use NULL and not an empty string! In Oracle: Are they the...