Every year, the ACM SIGMOD/PODS conference is held as a forum for database researchers, developers, and users to explore innovations in the field and exchange ideas. The conference is an opportunity for thought leaders to talk with each other and hear from one another through presentations, workshops, and tutorials. This year, Ben Vandiver, Shreya Prasad, Pratibha Rana, Eden Zik, Amin Saeidi, Pratyush Parimal, Styliani Pantela, and Jaimin Dave from Vertica Engineering are proud to say their paper, Eon Mode: Bringing the Vertica Columnar Database to the Cloud, was
accepted as an industrial paper for the 2018 conference. Eon mode would not have been possible without the support of the entire Vertica development team. Misha Davidson green-lit the project and Nga Tran provided additional engineering resources. Jason Slaunwhite ran the initial development effort. Vertica’s Pittsburgh crew (including Stephen Walkauskas, John Heffner, and Tharanga Gamaethige) made many important design suggestions. Our QA team (including Michelle Qian, Carl Gerstle, Fang Xing, Feng Tian, Packard Gilson, and Mark Hayden) regularly found design and implementation flaws. Lisa Donaghue and Phil Molea provided comprehensive documentation. Finally, we would like to thank our customers without whom Vertica would not exist.
Eon mode introduces new architecture in Vertica that places the data on a reliable shared storage, matching the original Vertica architecture’s performance on existing workloads, and supports new workloads. While the design reuses Vertica’ optimizer and execution engine, the metadata, storage, and fault tolerance mechanisms were re-architectured to enable and take advantage of shared storage. A sharding mechanism distributes the load over the nodes while retaining the capability of running node-local table joins. Running on Amazon EC2 compute and S3 storage, Eon mode demonstrate good performance, superior scalability, and robust operational behavior. With these improvements, Vertica delivers on the promise of cloud economics by consuming only the compute and storage resources needed, while supporting efficient elasticity.
Congratulations to the team for their acceptance. You can read more about Eon mode in the
Vertica documentation and in the
Vertica blog. Click
here to find details and the conference schedule. Please do attend the talks and stop by and say hello to our presenters and their co-authors. We’ll be happy to tell you more about our design and the trade-offs we encountered.
