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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Announcing Vertica 9.x Query Performance Tuning Training

Soniya Shah, Information Developer
May 29, 2018

This blog post was authored by Drea Brandford. You have had Vertica up and running in production for a while now; but you’re noticing that, while your analytic queries are executing far faster than they would in a traditional row-store database, they are still not performing quite as fast as you need them to. Chances...

Reusing EBS Volumes

Soniya Shah, Information Developer
May 24, 2018

This blog post was authored by Mark Hayden. You can deploy a Vertica cluster running in Eon or Enterprise mode using EC2 instances that support EBS volumes. This document provides the steps you need to use EBS volumes that were preserved from a Vertica cluster that was terminated, and how to reattach them to revive...
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Vertica Quick Tip: Tuple Mover (TM) Assigned More Resources in Vertica 9.1

Soniya Shah, Information Developer
May 24, 2018

This blog post was authored by Jim Knicely. In version 9.1 and later, Vertica increases the default amount of memory assigned to the Tuple Mover (TM) resource pool from 200MB to 5% of available memory to improve performance merging out wide tables. If your General resource pool is defined by a percentage, the Tuple Mover...

Vertica in Eon Mode: Revive

Soniya Shah, Information Developer
May 23, 2018

This blog post was authored by Soniya Shah. Overview An Eon Mode database keeps an updated version of its data and metadata in a communal storage location. After you shut down the database, the data continues to reside in communal storage. When you are ready to use the storage again, you can revive the database...

Vertica Quick Tip: Monitoring the Ancient History Mark

Soniya Shah, Information Developer
May 23, 2018

This blog post was authored by Jim Knicely. Also known as AHM, the ancient history mark is the oldest epoch whose data is accessible to historical queries. Any data that precedes the AHM is eligible to be purged. If a cluster nodes is down or if a database contains projections that need to be refreshed,...

Vertica Quick Tip: Determining Table Columns that Contain NULL Values

Soniya Shah, Information Developer
May 22, 2018

This blog post was authored by Jim Knicely. A client recently asked if we had a Vertica function that could return a list of columns from a table which contain NULL values. There aren’t any built-in functions for that, but there is always a fast solution available in Vertica! Here’s one! dbadmin=> CREATE OR REPLACE...

Why All Column Stores Are Not the Same

Soniya Shah, Information Developer
May 22, 2018

This blog post was authored by Steve Sarsfield. Critical Capabilities for Big Data Databases Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, but when imitators try to match brilliant engineering against uninspiring execution in order to meet the needs of a bullet on a PowerPoint slide, the imitation tends to be more of a parody, or...

UPDATE: Vertica Test Results with Microcode Patches for the Meltdown and Spectre Security Flaws

Soniya Shah, Information Developer
May 21, 2018

This blog post was authored by Michael Leuchtenburg. Introduction Vertica engineers tested database performance with and without Meltdown and Spectre mitigations on both Haswell and Skylake microprocessors. As compared to no mitigation, with the fastest settings, we found a minimal, average 1% slowdown on Haswell, and an average 25% slowdown on Skylake. These results are...

Vertica Quick Tip: Getting Better Performance via External Table Row Counts

Soniya Shah, Information Developer
May 21, 2018

This blog post was authored by Jim Knicely. The Vertica optimizer uses its own internal logic to determine whether to join one table to another as an inner or outer input. When joining external tables, you can help out the optimizer immensely by letting it know the exact row counts of those external tables! For...

Understanding Vertica Eon Mode

Soniya Shah, Information Developer
May 17, 2018

This blog post was authored by Soniya Shah. This blog post is updated as of July 2018. With Eon mode, Vertica is a database that takes advantage of all elastic compute and scalable storage capabilities in the cloud. In Eon mode, Vertica can take advantage of cloud economics – it can be made to scale...
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Vertica Quick Tip: Keeping DbVisualizer Alive

Soniya Shah, Information Developer
May 17, 2018

This blog post was authored by Jim Knicely. Clients often use DbVisualizer as their preferred GUI tool to query Vertica. Developers and DBAs tend to leave DbVisualizer open on their desktop while they are off doing some other activity, only to return to find out that DbVisualizer has disconnected from Vertica. Most likely the Database...

Vertica Quick Tip: Remove Duplicate Values from a String

Soniya Shah, Information Developer
May 16, 2018

This blog post was authored by Jim Knicely. Ever wonder how to get rid of those pesky duplicate values from a string? One way of doing that is via the REGEXP_REPLACE function. Have Fun!