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Vertica Big Data Conference 2020 – Are You Excited Yet?

Joy King, VP Product & GTM Strategy, Vertica
October 25, 2019

The Vertica Big Data Conference (BDC) clock is ticking and my excitement is growing by the minute! I want to make sure that our Vertica community is up to date on the latest news, especially some of the General Session speakers and Breakout tracks. And let’s not forget one of the most special components of...
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Get the Row Count from an Outer Table Join

James Knicely, Vertica Field Chief Technologist
October 22, 2019

Aggregate functions summarize data over groups of rows from a query result set. When using an aggregate function like COUNT with an "*" or "1" parameter value, you may get a different result when the query implements a LEFT join verses an INNER join. If you want a row count of just the rows from...
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Tracking Raw Schema Size Over Time

James Knicely, Vertica Field Chief Technologist
September 25, 2019

There is no way to go back in time to see how large a schema was a day/month/year ago. But you can use the AUDIT function to get a “raw” size of a schema and track growth over time by storing the results from a daily audit. Using cron, you can run this daily. Helpful...
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Have VSQL Beep Upon Command Completion

James Knicely, Vertica Field Chief Technologist
September 6, 2019

There are a lot of cool command line options available to VSQL. One of my favorites is the –b option which causes Vertica to “beep” when a command completes. This is very useful if you are running a very long sequence of SQL commands via a script. You can go off and do other things...
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Easy Development Schema Cleanup (i.e., Have Vertica Drop a Bunch of Tables for You)

James Knicely, Vertica Field Chief Technologist
September 5, 2019

On a development database, I have a lot of tables in the PUBLIC schema having similar names starting with “test_”. I’d like to drop all of these tables quickly. To do that, I can have Vertica generate the DROP commands and then execute them for me! P.S. Be careful with this command! Make sure when...
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Investigate Data Collector Table Data Produced by Scrutinize

James Knicely, Vertica Field Chief Technologist
September 5, 2019

The diagnostics tool scrutinize collects a broad range of information from a Vertica cluster. Part of the output from scrutinize includes data collector table data. Once extracted, we can easily load the data from a data collector table file into a Vertica Flex Table for analysis! Let’s take a look at the data from the...
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Load Data Enclosed By and Embedded With Double Quotes

James Knicely, Vertica Field Chief Technologist
September 4, 2019

Loading string data that is enclosed in double quotes where the string also contains double quotes can be problematic. We could alter the data so that it includes an escape character prior to each embedded double quote, but maybe that’s not possible. Another solution would be to use a FILLER to load the data then...
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Make a Cow Display Query Results in VSQL

James Knicely, Vertica Field Chief Technologist
August 19, 2019

I used to have fun with the amusing old Linux command Cowsay. It inserts any input into a word bubble and draws an ASCII cow to talk to you. You can make the cow display your query results in VSQL! Helpful Links: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cowsay https://www.vertica.com/docs/latest/HTML/Content/Authoring/ConnectingToVertica/vsql/Meta-Commands/MetaCommandReference.htm Have fun!
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Stop a Stubborn Query that Won’t Cancel

James Knicely, Vertica Field Chief Technologist
August 19, 2019

Sometimes a running SQL statement hangs and cannot be stopped using the CLOSE_SESSION or INTERRUPT_STATEMENT function. To stop it, first grab the culprit’s SESSION_ID, TRANSACTION_ID, and STATEMENT_ID from the QUERY_REQUESTS system table, then you can move it to a resource pool that has no resources! After the move and subsequent re-plan, the query will “usually”...
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Change Your User Password in VSQL with a Meta-Command

James Knicely, Vertica Field Chief Technologist
August 14, 2019

The \password VSQL meta-command can be used to change your database user’s password! The admin user can change the database password for any user: Helpful Link: https://www.vertica.com/docs/latest/HTML/Content/Authoring/ConnectingToVertica/vsql/Meta-Commands/MetaCommandReference.htm Have fun!
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Strong Winds of Change at Chief Data & Analytics Officers Event

Jeff Healey, Vice President of Marketing, Vertica Product Group in Micro Focus
August 14, 2019

Last week, Vertica sponsored the Chief Data & Analytics Officer event in Chicago. As a first-time sponsor, we were cautiously optimistic that we could meet with data and analytics leaders that were, according to event organizer IQPC, “…on the forefront of capitalizing on data and analytics in the enterprise as the volume, availability, and complexity...
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View the History of Connection Load Balance Operations

James Knicely, Vertica Field Chief Technologist
August 9, 2019

The Data Collector table DC_LOAD_BALANCE_OPERATIONS tracks the history of connection load balance operations. Helpful Links: https://www.vertica.com/docs/latest/HTML/Content/Authoring/AdministratorsGuide/ManagingClientConnections/LoadBalancing/ConnectionLoadBalancing.htm https://www.vertica.com/docs/latest/HTML/Content/Authoring/AdministratorsGuide/Monitoring/Vertica/RetainingMonitoringInformation.htm Have fun!