Vertica Blog

Vertica Blog

Analytics

Workload Management Metrics ? A Golden Triangle

Po Hong
July 17, 2014

Modern databases are often required to process many different kinds of workloads, ranging from short/tactical queries, to medium complexity ad-hoc queries, to long-running batch ETL jobs to extremely complex data mining jobs (See my previous blog on workload classification for more information.) DBAs must ensure that all concurrent workload, along with their respective Service Level...

Is Big Data Giving You Grief? Part 1: Denial

Walt_Maguire
July 14, 2014

My father passed away recently, and so I?ve found myself in the midst of a cycle of grief. And, in thinking about good blog topics, I realized that many of the organizations I?ve worked with over the years have gone through something very much like grief as they?ve come to confront big data challenges?and the...

The Automagic Pixie

Walt_Maguire
July 7, 2014

In previous installments of this series, I de-bunked some of the more common myths around big data analytics. In this final installment, I?ll address one of the most pervasive and costly myths: that there exists an easy button that organizations can press to automagically solve their big data problems. I?ll provide some insights as to...

Live Aggregate Projections with Vertica

Steven Sarsfield, Vertica Senior Product Marketing Manager – Partner Ecosystem
July 1, 2014

The Dragline release of Vertica offers an exciting new feature that is unique in the world of big data analytics platforms. We now offer Live Aggregate projections as part of the platform. The impact is that you can really fly through certain types of big data analytics that typically grind down any analytics system.

The Single-Solution Elf

Walt_Maguire
June 25, 2014

In this part of the de-mythification series, I’ll address another common misconception in the big data marketplace: that there exists a single piece of technology that will solve all big data problems. Whereas the first two entries in this series focused on market needs, this will focus more on the vendor side of things in terms of...

The Unstructured Leprechaun

Walt_Maguire
June 9, 2014

In this, the second of the multi-part ?de-mythification? series, I?ll address another common misconception in the Big Data marketplace today ? that there are only two types of data an enterprise must deal with for Big Data analytics ? structured and unstructured, and that unstructured data is somehow structure-free.
Three 3D arrows, different colors pointing in different directions

The Real-Time Unicorn

Walt_Maguire
June 2, 2014

In the first of this multi-part series, I?ll address one of the most common myths my colleagues and I have to confront in the Big Data marketplace today: the notion of ?real-time? data visibility. Whether it?s real-time analytics or real-time data, the same misconception always seems to come up. So I figured I?d address this,...

How to make ROLLUP fly in Vertica?

Po Hong
May 22, 2014

ROLLUP is a very common Online Analytic Processing (OLAP) function and is part of ANSI SQL. Many customers use ROLLUP to write reports that automatically perform sub-total aggregations across multiple dimensions at different levels in one SQL query.

Inside the Secret World of the Workload Analyzer

Curtis_1
May 6, 2014

When I?m on a flight sitting next to someone, and we?re making polite conversations, often the question comes up ?what do you do?? In these situations, I have to assess whether the person works in the IT industry or is otherwise familiar with the lingo. If not, my stock response is ?I fix databases?. This...

Can Vertica Climb a Tree?

Po Hong
March 24, 2014

The answer is YES if it is the right kind of tree. Here ?tree? refers to a common data structure that consists of parent-child hierarchical relationship such as an org chart. Traditionally this kind of hierarchical data structure can be modeled and stored in tables but is usually not simple to navigate and use in...

Enter the Flex Zone – Under the Hood

Ben Vandiver
February 14, 2014

With Vertica's latest release (Vertica 7 Crane"), we introduced Vertica Flex Zone, based on the patent-pending flex tables technology, which dynamically adapt to whatever schema is present in the data. Flex tables offer dramatic usability improvements over regular tables. In this post, we take a look under the hood and show how flex tables are...

Enter the FlexZone – Let’s talk ETL

Steven Sarsfield, Vertica Senior Product Marketing Manager – Partner Ecosystem
January 30, 2014

In December, HP released version 7 of the Vertica analytics platform which includes, among others, a great new feature called Vertica Flex Zone (Flex Zone). Flex Zone enables you to quickly and easily load, explore and analyze some forms of semi-structured data. It eliminates the need for coding-intensive schemas to be defined or applied before...