What’s New in Vertica 8.1: Security Updates

Vertica 8.1 includes the following enhancements to Vertica security.

Function to Verify Kerberos Configuration

The function KERBEROS_CONFIG_CHECK allows you to test your Kerberos configuration of the Vertica cluster. Running this function checks:
• Whether or not Kerberos services are available.
• If a keytab file exists
• If the Kerberos configuration parameters are set in the Vertica database.
• If Vertica read and invoke kinit with the keys.

For more information see Verify Kerberos Configuration and KERBEROS_CONFIG_CHECK.

Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) Support on JDBC

Vertica provides support for installing FIPS on JDBC. This involves downloading and installing a third-party JAR file called BouncyCastle.

To implement support you need to configure the java.security file and other JRE components to make it FIPS-enabled.

For more information see Installing the FIPS Client Driver for JDBC.

Performance upgrade when adding multiple nodes to a cluster

Adding multiple nodes to the cluster is much faster due to only having to serialize the catalog once. This is beneficial when you are adding many nodes and large database catalogs.