Vertica


Vertica Systems is an analytic database management software company. Vertica was founded in 2005 by database researcher Michael Stonebraker and Andrew Palmer. Palmer was the founding CEO. Ralph Breslauer and Christopher P. Lynch served as later CEOs.
Lynch joined as Chairman and CEO in 2010 and was responsible for Vertica's acquisition by Hewlett Packard in March 2011. The acquisition expanded the HP Software portfolio for enterprise companies and the public sector group. As part of the Micro Focus-Hewlett Packard Enterprise merger, Vertica joined Micro Focus in September, 2017.

Products

The column-oriented Vertica Analytics Platform was designed to manage large, fast-growing volumes of data and provide very fast query performance when used for data warehouses and other query-intensive applications. The product claims to greatly improve query performance over traditional relational database systems, and to provide high availability and exabyte scalability on commodity enterprise servers. Vertica is infrastructure-independent, supporting deployments on multiple cloud platforms, on-premises and natively on Hadoop nodes. Vertica's Eon Mode, available on Amazon Web Services and on premise with Pure Storage Flashblade, separates compute from storage and leverages low cost S3 object storage and the ability to apply compute to variable workloads, capitalizing on cloud economics. Vertica claims that its Eon Mode architecture is the only analytics platform that separates compute from storage and brings the advantages of cloud architecture to on premise data centers.
Its design features include:
Vertica's specialized approach aims to significantly increase query performance in data warehouses, while reducing the total cost of ownership by reducing the hardware footprint.
In late 2011, the Vertica Analytics Platform Community Edition was made available for free with certain limitations, such as a maximum of one terabyte of raw data, three-node cluster, and community-based support.

Optimizations

The Vertica Analytics Platform runs on clusters of Linux-based commodity servers. It is also available on the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, Microsoft Azure and the Google Cloud Platform, ensuring no infrastructure or platform lock in. The product integrates with Hadoop to leverage HDFS via External Tables with ORC and Parquet Readers and can be installed on Hadoop nodes in a co-located manner as Vertica for SQL on Hadoop. These combined capabilities allow users to choose where to analyze their data, including across multiple data lakes.
A range of BI, data visualization, and ETL tools are certified to work with and integrate with the Vertica Analytics Platform. Vertica also offers a certified and secure interface with the popular Kafka message bus, allowing streaming data ingestion. This capability combined with Vertica's high performance analytics supports use cases like Internet of Things, Edge Analytics and near real time Fraud Prevention.
Several of Vertica’s features were originally prototyped within the C-Store column-oriented database, an academic open source research project at MIT and other universities. The system's architecture is described in a 2012 VLDB paper.

Versions and documentation

In January 2008, Sybase filed a patent-infringement lawsuit against Vertica. In January 2010, Vertica prevailed in a preliminary hearing, and in June, 2010, Sybase and Vertica resolved the suit, with the court dismissing all infringement claims. Under the leadership of Colin Mahony, Vertica has sponsored various technological events in the database industry.
In August 2013, Vertica held its first Big Data conference event in Boston, MA USA. This event was held again in 2014, 2015, 2016, and .
In 2016, Vertica published .