Vertica Blog
Soniya Shah smiling

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 Should I do When the Database Process is not Starting?

Soniya Shah, Information Developer
June 14, 2018

If you want to troubleshoot why the database process is not starting, follow this checklist. Step Task Results 1 Ensure Vertica is not already running on any node. The Vertica process displays as follows: Prior to proceeding to any further checks, ensure the dbadmin is the owner of and has access to the catalog directory...

What Should I do When the Database Node is DOWN?

Soniya Shah, Information Developer
June 14, 2018

When database node is DOWN, troubleshoot using the following checklist. Step Task Results 1 Check whether your database is UP. If the database is UP, go to Step 2. If the database if not UP, restart your database. If the database starts, the checklist is complete. If the database does not start, see the Database...

Understanding Vertica Query Budgets

Soniya Shah, Information Developer
June 13, 2018

This blog post was authored by Shrirang Kamat. The purpose of this document is to explain how the query budget of a resource pool used by the query can influence the initial memory acquisition for a query and how it impacts query performance. For more details about how we compute the query budget, see the...
Modern Database Analytics

How to Code Vertica UDx

Soniya Shah, Information Developer
June 12, 2018

This blog post was authored by Ding-Qiang Liu. In analytic businesses supported by Vertica, complex processing logic is sometimes unavoidable. Using ANSI SQL might cause query strings to be much longer, and will slow the query with a huge volume data to query. If using Vertica SDKs, you can encapsulate that general computing logic in...

How to Do Time Series Analysis in Vertica

Soniya Shah, Information Developer
June 11, 2018

This blog post was authored by Maurizio Felici. Time series analytics evaluate the values of a given set of variables over time and group those values into a window, based on a time interval for analysis and aggregation. There are a few types of functions that help perform time series analytics: Event based functions Time...

Load Balancing Options

Soniya Shah, Information Developer
June 7, 2018

This blog post was authored by Soniya Shah. Connection load balancing automatically spreads the overhead of client connections across the cluster by redirecting connections. Each client connection a host in your Vertica cluster requires memory and processor time. If a lot of clients connect to a single host, this can affect database performance. The initiator...

Can you tell us about your data lake?

Soniya Shah, Information Developer
June 5, 2018

It's the fourth round of Vertica product management surveys and we have really appreciated getting your feedback! In this survey, we want to know all about your data lake. We want to know what tools you use, how much data is in your lake, and the types of workloads you are running. We are hoping...

Make data analysis easier with dimensionality reduction

Soniya Shah, Information Developer
June 5, 2018

This blog post was authored by Anh Le. Introduction As the number of features in your data set grows, it becomes harder to work with. Visualizing 2D or 3D data is straightforward, but for higher dimensions you can only select a subset of two or three features to plot at a time, or turn to...

Machine Learning Key Terms

Soniya Shah, Information Developer
June 4, 2018

This blog post was authored by Soniya Shah. Machine learning seems to be everywhere these days – in the online recommendations you get on Netflix, the self-driving cars that hyped in the media, and in serious cases, like fraud detection. Data is a huge part of machine learning, and so are the key terms. Unless...
Modern Database Analytics

Vertica Quick Tip: Replacing an Empty String

Soniya Shah, Information Developer
May 31, 2018

This blog post was authored by Jim Knicely. In Vertica an empty string is not treated as a NULL value, so an empty string does equal an empty string. The function REPLACE replaces all occurrences of characters in a string with another set of characters. The REPLACE function appears to work well with an empty...
Programmer

What’s New in Vertica 9.1: Python SDK Expands

Soniya Shah, Information Developer
May 30, 2018

This blog post was authored by Monica Cellio. Using the Vertica SDK, you can write several types of user-defined extensions (UDxs) to add your own customizations. In a previous release the SDK added Python support for one type, scalar functions (UDSFs). In 9.1 we added Python support for transform functions (UDTFs). User-Defined Transform Functions (UDTFs)...

Vertica Quick Tip: Which Column in my Flattened Table caused the “Subquery used as an expression returned more than one row” Error?

Soniya Shah, Information Developer
May 29, 2018

This blog post was authored by Jim Knicely. A flattened table contains columns that are derived from query-expressions that must return only one row and column value, or none. If a column’s query-expression does return more than one row you will get a “Subquery used as an expression returned more than one row” error. If...