Vertica Blog
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Soniya Shah

Information Developer

Currently, a first year law student with a background in science and technology. Experienced technical writer, with specializations in software documentation, big data, blog development, and website development. I build user-centered content to communicate complex and technical information more easily.

I used to work for Vertica full time for about 3 years. I still work at Vertica part time while going to law school.

Update: Soniya is now doing her law internship, and no longer working at Vertica. Good luck, Soniya!

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What’s New in Vertica 8.1.1: Catalog Memory Improvements

Soniya Shah, Information Developer
August 17, 2017

This blog post was authored by Soniya Shah. In Vertica 8.1.1, we introduce a performance improvement that reduces catalog memory usage for users with a large number of NULL values in tables. The improvement affects all string data types, including BINARY, VARBINARY, LONG VARBINARY, CHAR, VARCHAR and LONG VARCHAR. The improvement scales with the data...
Database Server Room

Configuring tcp Idle Settings for Long Running Idle Sessions

Soniya Shah, Information Developer
August 14, 2017

This blog post was authored by Soniya Shah. Important: For all recommendations to changing setting values, you must change the settings on all nodes in the cluster. It is not advisable to have different settings on different nodes. Have you ever encountered one of the following types of errors? With each of these errors, the...

How to Publish Data Collector Tables to Apache Kafka

Soniya Shah, Information Developer
August 10, 2017

This blog post was authored by Serge Bonte. You are probably familiar with the Vertica Data Collector (DC) and have used the granular information it collects to monitor and optimize Vertica deployments. A common challenge is that Data Collector keeps only a portion of that information—controlled by retention policies —in the internal DC tables before...

View Privileges

Soniya Shah, Information Developer
August 8, 2017

This blog post was authored by Soniya Shah. This set of examples shows the privileges a user needs for various operations related to views, including creating and querying. A view is a virtual table based on the result set of a SQL statement, also called a SQL query. To select from a view, you need...

Geospatial Analysis on Shapefile of Longitude and Latitude Data Using Vertica: Hurricane Bonnie

Soniya Shah, Information Developer
August 7, 2017

This blog post was authored by Ginger Ni. Like any natural disaster, hurricanes can leave behind extensive damage to life and property. The question asked by NGOs, government agencies, and insurance companies is, "How can we predict the locations where a storm will inflict the most damage?" Modern spatial analysis enables us to predict the...

Machine Learning Mondays: Vertica 8.1.1 Cheat Sheet

Soniya Shah, Information Developer
July 31, 2017

This blog post was authored by Vincent Xu. Vertica 8.1.1 provides SQL functions that support the complete machine learning workflow—from cleaning your data to training a model to evaluating model performance. Vertica machine learning is fast and scalable along the sizes of data samples, features, and computing cluster. Best of all, no data movement is...

What’s New in Vertica 8.1.1: Introducing Export to Parquet Format

Soniya Shah, Information Developer
July 25, 2017

This blog post was authored by Deepak Majeti. Vertica customers often ask the following questions: 1. "We want to keep hot/warm data in Vertica and move warm/cold data to an open file format on cheap external storage. How do we do this? " 2."How can we store the results from Vertica in an open file...
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What’s New in Vertica 8.1.1: Cloudera Manager Support

Soniya Shah, Information Developer
July 24, 2017

This blog post was authored by Mitchell Tracy. In Vertica 8.1.1, we introduce support for Cloudera Manager. Cloudera Manager is a platform that Hadoop administrators can use to manage their Hadoop cluster. It allows them to see the hosts associated with their cluster, and the different Hadoop services running on the cluster. Cloudera Manager also...
Modern Database Analytics

Vertica In-Database Approximate Count Distinct Functions Using LogLogBeta

Soniya Shah, Information Developer
July 19, 2017

This blog post was authored by Ginger Ni. Counting Distinct Values Data cardinality is a commonly used statistic in data analysis. Vertica has the exact COUNT(DISTINCT) function to count distinct values in a data set, but the function does not scale well for extremely large data sets. When exploring large data sets, speed is critical....
Programmer

What’s New in Vertica 8.1.1: Machine Learning

Soniya Shah, Information Developer
July 17, 2017

This blog post was authored by Soniya Shah. Vertica 8.1.1 continues with the fast-paced development for machine learning. In this release, we introduce the highly-requested random forest algorithm. We added support for SVM to include SVM for regression, in addition to the existing SVM for classification algorithm. L2 regularization was added to both the linear...

What’s New in Vertica 8.1.1?

Soniya Shah, Information Developer
July 11, 2017

This blog post was authored by Soniya Shah. In Vertica 8.1.1, we introduce new functionality including: • Supported platform updates • Machine learning updates • Management Console enhancements • Apache Hadoop, Apache Kafka, and Apache Spark integration updates • Database management improvements • Workload management • Table data management updates • SQL functions and statements...

Understanding Backup Space Utilization

Soniya Shah, Information Developer
July 10, 2017

This blog post was authored by Soniya Shah. Creating regular database backups is an important part of database maintenance. The vbr utility lets you back up, restore, and copy your database to another cluster. You can create full and incremental backups, and even back up objects, such as tables. Ideally, backups should match what is...