Vertica

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For the genus of grass skipper butterflies, see Vertica (butterfly).
Vertica Systems, Inc.
Type Private
Founded 2005
Headquarters Andover, MA
Industry Enterprise Software & Database Management & Data Warehousing
Website www.vertica.com

Vertica Systems is a start-up company[1] [2] developing a database management system. The Vertica database is optimized for query performance on large data warehouses and other query-intensive applications. Its design features include:

  • Column-oriented storage organization, which increases performance of sequential record access at the expense of common transactional operations such as single record retrieval, updates, and deletes.[3]
  • Out-of-place updates and hybrid storage organization, which increase the performance of queries, insertions, and loads, but at the expense of updates and deletes.
  • Compression, which reduces storage costs and I/O bandwidth. High compression is possible because columns of homogeneous datatype are stored together and because updates to the main store are batched.[4]
  • Shared nothing architecture, which reduces system contention for shared resources and allows gradual degradation of performance in the face of hardware failure.

Vertica’s product is based on the C-Store column-oriented database technology developed as an open source project at MIT and other universities.

The overall approach shows promise in significantly increasing query performance in data warehouses. A use case detailed in One Size Fits All? Part 2: Benchmarking Results [5] (sect. 3.1) shows a performance improvement of hundreds of times with Vertica in a specific application due to the use of the vertical DBMS approach.

Vertica was founded in 2005 by database research and technology pioneer Dr. Michael Stonebraker; and Andrew Palmer, a business executive with experience in both software and biotechnology.

[edit] See also

[edit] References

  1. ^ Network World staff: "New database company raises funds, nabs ex-Oracle bigwigs”, [1] LinuxWorld, February 14, 2007
  2. ^ Brodkin, J: "10 enterprise software companies to watch", [2] Network World, April 11, 2007
  3. ^ Monash, C: "Are row-oriented RDBMS obsolete?" [3] DBMS2, January 22, 2007
  4. ^ Monash, C: "Mike Stonebraker on database compression – comments”,[4]DBMS2, March 24, 2007

[edit] External links