Vertica Blog

Vertica Blog

Projections

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How to Use UDx to Extend Vertica Live Aggregate Projections

Maurizio Felici, Field Chief Technologist
August 8, 2023

Thanks to its sophisticated optimizer and extremely efficient query engine Vertica can process data aggregations order of magnitudes faster than traditional Database Management Systems. To further boost data aggregation performance, we can use Vertica’s Live Aggregate Projections (LAP from now on). The concept is very simple: pre-aggregate data once during load operations rather than doing...
SQL Query Optimization

Improving COUNT DISTINCT Performance with Approximate Functions

Bryan Herger, Vertica Big Data Solution Architect at Micro Focus
November 16, 2022

A common analytic use case is to find the number of distinct items in a data set. Vertica performs well at solving COUNT DISTINCT in a few ways. Since Vertica stores all data in columns, it is possible to optimize for COUNT DISTINCT by building a projection that is tuned for this use case. Vertica...
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Vertica Version 10 Launches Today!

Paige Roberts, Vertica Open Source Relations Manager
March 31, 2020

There’s big news today, on the first day of the Virtual Vertica Big Data Conference 2020 – a major new version of Vertica blasts off! Vertica version 10 soars straight into the greatest deployment flexibility of any analytical data warehouse on the market. This fast and extremely scalable platform gives you more power than ever...
Global Partitions

Optimizing Vertica Data With Partitions

Bryan Herger, Vertica Big Data Solution Architect at Micro Focus
February 20, 2020

How do partitions affect overall Vertica operations? Let’s look at a snapshot of the Flight Data Tracker dataset and compare performance ...
Brandeis University sign

Hands-on Class Makes Parallel Data Management Theories Concrete

Mike Perrow, Senior Product Marketing Writer/Editor
February 5, 2020

Parallel data management in databases is a tough thing to learn when you’re a student. It can feel like another one of those esoteric theories, and it never quite sticks. Now, there’s a cool class at Brandeis University that brings those lofty theories down to earth, and gives students a real chance to see how...

Announcing Vertica 9.3 Instructor-Led Training Courses

Drea Brandford, Technical Consultant
November 21, 2019

Just in time for the release of version 9.3, Vertica is pleased to announce the release of two updated instructor-led training courses: Vertica 9.3 Essentials and Vertica 9.3 Descriptive Analytics. A description of each course follows: Vertica 9.3 Essentials This 4-day course explores the capabilities of the Vertica platform solution in Enterprise mode, and prepares...

Are Your Columns too Wide?

Bryan Herger, Vertica Big Data Solution Architect at Micro Focus
November 14, 2019

This tip expands on the earlier post on encoding and compression at Checking and Improving Column Compression and Encoding When you have millions to billions of rows, data type becomes a bit more important: even an extra 10 bytes per row across a huge data set will impact storage or performance (or both!). When I...

Checking and Improving Column Compression and Encoding

Bryan Herger, Vertica Big Data Solution Architect at Micro Focus
November 7, 2019

When working with terabytes of data, storage and transfer become major time and cost sinks. Vertica can help minimize storage cost and transfer time with column compression and encoding. How can we identify Vertica tables that might benefit from compression? Information about column size and current compression is stored across column_storage and projection_columns table. The...
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Vertica 9.3 Supports UPDATE and DELETE Operations on Tables Having Live Aggregate Projections!

James Knicely, Vertica Field Chief Technologist
October 17, 2019

A live aggregate projection contains columns with values that are aggregated from columns in its anchor table. When you load data into the table, Vertica aggregates the data before loading it into the live aggregate projection. On subsequent loads (for example, through INSERT or COPY) Vertica recalculates aggregations with the new data and updates the...
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Announcing Vertica Version 9.3 – Ride the Winds of Change

Paige Roberts, Vertica Open Source Relations Manager
October 16, 2019

The winds of change have been blowing strong. This week, Vertica version 9.3 made its big splash. Vertica has a tendency to pack a lot of features even into minor releases, and this is not a minor release. Rather than dive deep, I’m going to skim the surface of the ocean of new features. Eon...
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The Vertica Academy Is Open for Learning

Joy King, VP Product & GTM Strategy, Vertica
September 9, 2019

One of the greatest impacts from digital transformation, both from a personal and professional point of view, is not just the democratization of data - a very popular topic here at Vertica! - but the democratization of knowledge. Today, we are excited to announce the new Vertica Academy, a platform that offers self-paced, technical training...

Setting the Table-Level Active Partition Count: Quick Tip

Phil Molea, Sr. Information Developer, Vertica
August 30, 2018

Jim Knicely authored this tip. The Tuple Mover assumes that all loads and updates to a partitioned table are targeted to one or more partitions that it identifies as active. In general, the partitions with the largest partition keys—typically, the most recently created partitions—are regarded as active. As the partition ages, it commonly transitions to...