Understanding Vertica Licenses
Vertica has flexible licensing terms. It can be licensed on the following bases:
- Term-based (valid until a specific date)
- Size-based (valid to store up to a specified amount of raw data)
- Both term- and size-based
- Unlimited duration and data storage
- Node-based with an unlimited number of CPUs and users (one node is a server acting as a single computer system, whether physical or virtual)
Vertica Community Edition licenses include 1 terabyte data and a limit of 3 nodes.
Vertica for SQL on Apache Hadoop is a separate product with its own license. This documentation covers both products. Consult your license agreement for details about available features and limitations.
Your license key has your licensing bases encoded into it. If you are unsure of your current license, you can view your license information from within Vertica.
Vertica Analytics Platform License Types
Vertica Analytics Platform is a full-featured offering with all analytical functions described in this documentation. It is best used for advanced analytics and enterprise data warehousing. There are two editions, Community Edition and Premium Edition.
Vertica Community Edition: You can download and start using Community Edition for free. The Community Edition license allows customers the following:
- 3 node limit
- 1 terabyte data limit
Community Edition licenses cannot be installed co-located in a Hadoop infrastructure and used to query data stored in Hadoop formats.
Vertica Premium Edition: You can purchase the Premium Edition license. The Premium Edition license entitles customers to:
- No node limit
- Data amount as specified by the license
-
Store data in HDFS and read limited data from HDFS, as specified in your license
Premium Edition licenses cannot be installed co-located in a Hadoop infrastructure.
Note: Vertica does not support license downgrades.
Vertica for SQL on Apache Hadoop License
Vertica for SQL on Apache Hadoop is a license for running Vertica on a Hadoop environment. This allows users to run Vertica on data that is in a shared storage environment. It is best used for exploring data in a Hadoop data lake. It can be used only in co-located Hadoop environments to query data stored in Hadoop (Hortonworks, MapR, or Cloudera).
Customers can purchase this term-based SQL on Apache Hadoop license per the number of nodes they plan to use in their Hadoop environment. The license then audits the number of nodes being used for compliance.