Vertica Blog

Vertica Blog

Vertica Blog

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Vertica Customer Experience Survey

Soniya Shah, Information Developer
February 13, 2018

You are a valued Vertica customer and we are interested in your opinions. We want to hear about your experiences with our product, technical support, documentation, and community. Please take a few minutes to respond to our short survey and evaluate our database product here. We look forward to hearing from you!

Vertica Quick Tip: Analyzing Table Statistics by Column

Soniya Shah, Information Developer
February 13, 2018

This blog post was authored by Jim Knicely. The ANALYZE_STATISTICS function collects and aggregates data samples and storage information from all nodes that store projections associated with the specified table. On a very large wide table it will take a significant amount of time to gather those statistics. In many situations only a few columns...

Vertica Tip: The System Table for System Tables

Soniya Shah, Information Developer
February 12, 2018

This blog post was authored by Sarah Lemaire. Most of you probably know that Vertica provides system tables that allow you to monitor • System resources • Background processes • Workload • Performance • Catalog size These tables help you to profile, diagnose, and view historical data equivalent to load streams, query profiles, Tuple Mover...

Identifying Projection Skew

Soniya Shah, Information Developer
February 12, 2018

This blog post was authored by Curtis Bennett. In Vertica, projections can either be replicated (unsegmented), or segmented. A segmented projection divides the data up across all the nodes in your cluster. Segmentation works by hashing a key value, and then using some simple math, figuring out which node that piece of data will live...
Database Server Room

What Projections are not Being Used

Soniya Shah, Information Developer
February 8, 2018

This blog post was authored by Eugenia Moreno. It is common to create new projections to improve performance in Vertica. However, you might forget about the old projections. Vertica still loads data in projections that you might not be using. A projection that is loaded but not picked up by the Vertica optimizer consumes storage...

Vertica Quick Tip: Sampling Data from the Entire Table

Soniya Shah, Information Developer
February 8, 2018

This blog post was authored by Jim Knicely. A development or quality assurance team often times requests access to a sub-set of production data. One way to do that would be to make use of the LIMIT clause. The problem with that method is the team won’t get a very good sampling of the data....

Query Execution in Eon Mode

Soniya Shah, Information Developer
February 7, 2018

This blog post was authored by Ben Vandiver. How Vertica distributes query processing across the cluster in Eon mode is a complex topic that is best illustrated through a concrete example. As part of this post, we'll start with a simple data load and walk through metadata storage and query execution. To begin, we need...

Vertica Quick Tip: Superfast Table Copy

Soniya Shah, Information Developer
February 7, 2018

This blog post was authored by Jim Knicely. Very often we need to make a copy of a very large table in order to do some development or quality assurance type of duties. Typically we’ll use a CREATE TABLE AS SELECT (CTAS) statement to make that copy. But that took a very long time (~...

Vertica Quick Tip: Add a Time Zone

Soniya Shah, Information Developer
February 6, 2018

This blog post was authored by Jim Knicely. Vertica recognizes many time zones. However, there might come a time (zone) when you will need to reference one that is not available by default. Luckily it’s relatively easy to add a time zone to Vertica. But I would like to use the “Hawaii-Aleutian Daylight Time (HDT)”...

What’s New in Vertica 9.0.1: Security and Authentication

Soniya Shah, Information Developer
February 6, 2018

This blog post was authored by Soniya Shah. In this release, we introduce some security enhancements. We've added the ability to grant and revoke privileges on system tables, using the same syntax as you would for granting and revoking on tables. However, there are some limitations about the types of privileges you can use with...

Vertica Quick Tip: Default Size of the NUMBER Data Type

Soniya Shah, Information Developer
February 5, 2018

This blog post was authored by Jim Knicely. When creating a table where you do not define a precision for a NUMBER column data type, Vertica will use a default precision of 38 digits. Often this is larger than necessary. By specifying NUMBER(37) you will potentially get better query performance and save on storage. Why?...

Vertica Tip: Predicting the Resources a Statement Needs

Soniya Shah, Information Developer
February 5, 2018

This blog post was authored by Eugenia Moreno. You may find you want to set up resource pools before running queries to know how many resources a particular query needs. One way to do this is to create a small resource pool, profile the query, and note when the query is rejected. When the query...