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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Tracking Raw Schema Size Over Time

Jim Knicely, Vertica Field Chief Technologist
September 25, 2019

There is no way to go back in time to see how large a schema was a day/month/year ago. But you can use the AUDIT function to get a “raw” size of a schema and track growth over time by storing the results from a daily audit. Using cron, you can run this daily. Helpful...
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Have VSQL Beep Upon Command Completion

Jim Knicely, Vertica Field Chief Technologist
September 6, 2019

There are a lot of cool command line options available to VSQL. One of my favorites is the –b option which causes Vertica to “beep” when a command completes. This is very useful if you are running a very long sequence of SQL commands via a script. You can go off and do other things...
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Easy Development Schema Cleanup (i.e., Have Vertica Drop a Bunch of Tables for You)

Jim Knicely, Vertica Field Chief Technologist
September 5, 2019

On a development database, I have a lot of tables in the PUBLIC schema having similar names starting with “test_”. I’d like to drop all of these tables quickly. To do that, I can have Vertica generate the DROP commands and then execute them for me! P.S. Be careful with this command! Make sure when...
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Investigate Data Collector Table Data Produced by Scrutinize

Jim Knicely, Vertica Field Chief Technologist
September 5, 2019

The diagnostics tool scrutinize collects a broad range of information from a Vertica cluster. Part of the output from scrutinize includes data collector table data. Once extracted, we can easily load the data from a data collector table file into a Vertica Flex Table for analysis! Let’s take a look at the data from the...
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Load Data Enclosed By and Embedded With Double Quotes

Jim Knicely, Vertica Field Chief Technologist
September 4, 2019

Loading string data that is enclosed in double quotes where the string also contains double quotes can be problematic. We could alter the data so that it includes an escape character prior to each embedded double quote, but maybe that’s not possible. Another solution would be to use a FILLER to load the data then...
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Make a Cow Display Query Results in VSQL

Jim Knicely, Vertica Field Chief Technologist
August 19, 2019

I used to have fun with the amusing old Linux command Cowsay. It inserts any input into a word bubble and draws an ASCII cow to talk to you. You can make the cow display your query results in VSQL! Helpful Links: Have fun!
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Stop a Stubborn Query that Won’t Cancel

Jim Knicely, Vertica Field Chief Technologist
August 19, 2019

Sometimes a running SQL statement hangs and cannot be stopped using the CLOSE_SESSION or INTERRUPT_STATEMENT function. To stop it, first grab the culprit’s SESSION_ID, TRANSACTION_ID, and STATEMENT_ID from the QUERY_REQUESTS system table, then you can move it to a resource pool that has no resources! After the move and subsequent re-plan, the query will “usually”...
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Change Your User Password in VSQL with a Meta-Command

Jim Knicely, Vertica Field Chief Technologist
August 14, 2019

The \password VSQL meta-command can be used to change your database user’s password! The admin user can change the database password for any user: Helpful Link: Have fun!
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View the History of Connection Load Balance Operations

Jim Knicely, Vertica Field Chief Technologist
August 9, 2019

The Data Collector table DC_LOAD_BALANCE_OPERATIONS tracks the history of connection load balance operations. Helpful Links: Have fun!
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Load Balance Older Clients (That You Can’t Upgrade for Some Weird Reason)

Jim Knicely, Vertica Field Chief Technologist
August 8, 2019

Native connection load balancing is a feature built into the Vertica Analytic Database server and client libraries as well as . To load balance vsql you can use the - -enable-connection-load-balance or -C command line options. In really old versions of vsql those options did not exist. How do you load balance connections from those...
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Testing the Native Load Balancer

Jim Knicely, Vertica Field Chief Technologist
August 7, 2019

Native connection load balancing is a feature built into the Vertica Analytic Database server and client libraries as well as . The RUN_LOAD_BALANCE_POLICY function returns a string formatted as address:port that results from running the current Native Load Balancer policy. It’s a great tool for testing after enabling a new Load Balance Policy! Because the...
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Find the Busiest Hour in the Day for I/O

Jim Knicely, Vertica Field Chief Technologist
August 2, 2019

The IO_USAGE system table provides disk I/O bandwidth usage history for the system. You can query it to find out interesting IO statistics like which hour of the day has the most IO usage on your Vertica cluster! Helpful Link: Have fun!