Master Blog Series: Vertica Database Administrators

Posted November 5, 2018 by Soniya Shah, Information Developer

Three 3D arrows, different colors pointing in different directions
Are you a database administrator looking for ways to get the most from your Vertica database? If so, this post is for you. You’re already familiar with the technicalities of Vertica – the Tuple Mover, deletes, projections, and more. If you’re looking to get started, check out our master blog for new users, Master Blog Series: Getting Started with Vertica. But if you want more information about understanding backups, best practices for Vertica and even how to redesign and configure the database to best meet your workload needs, read through this post for the top 5 must read posts for database administrators.

Best Practices for Monitoring Vertica. We all know the health of the database is such a key aspect for making sure everything is running properly. And just like us, the Vertica database needs checks to ensure its health is maintained. This document covers everything from recovery and rebalance to monitoring DC tables. Each section provides sample queries you can run to see how to best monitor Vertica to verify it is running in the way that suits your business needs.

Best Practices for Managing Resource Pools. This document was written for Vertica administrators and walks through a few examples of how to create custom resource pools to handle both well-defined and ad-hoc workloads. The beauty of Vertica is that it excels at handling a variety of queries at the same time. When multiple queries run on the system, the queries share resources. Each query can take longer to run than if it were running alone. The resource managers helps prioritize usage and handles resources using resource pools. A resource pool is a pre-allocated subset of the system resources, with an associated queue. This document walks through use cases intended to help you create the best resource pools for managing your workload.

Node Recovery in Vertica. In Vertica Enterprise Mode, a node in the DOWN state does not participate in any transactions committed since the time the node went down. After restarting the DOWN node, that node must recover the data it missed during the down time from its buddy node before it can go back to the UP state. When the node is in the UP state, it is fully recovered and read to process all database transactions. This document assumes you already have experience recovering nodes.

Best Practices for Preparing Your Cluster for Rebalance. This document describes how to prepare your cluster for rebalance and how to estimate how long it will take to rebalance your database. Read through a customer’s experience with rebalance and learn how to make the most of the rebalance experience.

Understanding Backup Space Utilization. Another important part of maintaining your Vertica database is making sure you perform frequent backups. You can create full and incremental backups and even backup database objects, such as tables. This post shows you how to evaluate your space utilization, so you don’t run into an error while trying to perform a backup.

And there you have it, the top 5 resources for Vertica database administrators!

And as a bonus, if you’re looking for more information about Backup to S3, checkout this introductory blog for more information.