Vertica Analytic Database 3.5 Broadens Reach with Added FlexStore Architecture, Incorporates MapReduce Integration

SAN DIEGO -

A new version of the Vertica Analytic Database features a next-generation database architecture that promises huge performance gains for a broader range of analytic applications that can now take full advantage of the columnar MPP database’s blazingly fast speeds.

Vertica 3.5, which is being announced today at the TDWI World Conference, pioneers an innovative enhancement in storing and processing columnar data called FlexStore(TM). Vertica FlexStore is a breakthrough in column database architecture. Unlike earlier-generation column databases, Vertica automatically applies a variety of physical design, database storage and query execution techniques that keep the DBMS optimized for the analytic workload it’s supporting at the time. Techniques include:

– Column Grouping - Groups multiple columns into a single disk file thus minimizing file IO for workloads that read a large percentage of the columns in a table, that do single row look-ups, that query against many small columns or that frequently update data in these columns. Grouped columns benefit from special compression and retrieval techniques. — Intelligent Disk Utilization - This intelligent tagging capability automates the creation of a tiered storage environment to support enterprise information lifecycle management (ILM) strategies, assigning frequently accessed data to faster, higher-quality media such as double-parity RAIDs or solid state disks (SSDs), while moving less frequently accessed data to slower disks in the cluster. — Enhanced Query Execution Engine - Query execution is optimized based on several factors such as the column groupings, storage layout, concurrency and available cores on the machine to provide improved CPU utilization and efficient memory usage. — Faster data loading - Data loading is automatically optimized using proprietary data grouping to speed the load process. — Fast Deletes - Vertica can be optimized to enhance delete performance for applications that frequently purge data.

FlexStore is the latest in a long line of Vertica innovations that have helped it perform faster, require less hardware and administrative overhead and support a broader range of applications, even those with workloads traditionally considered a weakness of first-generation column databases like SybaseIQ.

“Massively parallel (MPP) column-oriented databases typically outperform other databases by a factor of 50 or more. Our mission is to bring this speed to all analytic applications,” said David Menninger, Vertica VP of marketing and product management. “More vendors have begun offering column-based products, but with the introduction of FlexStore Vertica is upping the performance and flexibility ante once again.”

With version 3.5, Vertica also introduces native support for MapReduce via connectivity to the standard Hadoop framework. The Vertica 3.5 interface to Hadoop gives MapReduce developers the ability to perform highly scalable in-database analytics by making it easy to store and retrieve data from the equally scalable Vertica Analytic Database. This unique combination of MPP analytic database and MPP compute framework gives enterprises the flexibility to process large sets of structured and unstructured data and make them available to business users at Web speeds.

“Vertica’s introduction of support for MapReduce differs from the approach of other vendors in that it supports it as a parallel capability rather than as something integrated with SQL. This makes sense because most people using MapReduce are not SQL programmers, and vice versa,” said Philip Howard of Bloor Research.

In addition to the new storage architecture, Vertica 3.5 includes dozens of new features based on requests from scores of Vertica users in nearly 100 real-world deployments that improve performance, programming and analysis of the database. These include:

– MicroStrategy 9 certification — Cognos certification — Automatic DBDesigner enhancements — Bulk Loader enhancements — Optimizations for faster Joins & Analytics — Next generation user experience for monitoring and administration — …and many others

Vertica 3.5 has a unique columnar, MPP architecture and pioneering data compression to reduce storage requirements by as much as 90 percent, dramatically cutting hardware overhead and energy consumption so companies can analyze larger amounts of data at a fraction of the cost. It can operate directly on that compressed data, delivering query results 50 to 200 times faster than other databases.

Vertica 3.5 will be generally available in October 2009 and can be run on Linux servers, any VMware vSphere or VMware Server-supported hardware, or on-demand in enterprise and public clouds such as the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2).

About Vertica

Vertica Systems is the market innovator for high-performance analytic database management systems that run on industry-standard hardware. Co-founded by database pioneer Dr. Michael Stonebraker, Vertica has developed column-oriented analytic database technology with an MPP architecture that lets companies of any size store and query very large databases orders of magnitude faster and more affordably than other solutions. The Vertica Analytic Database is available as software only, as a hardware based appliance, as a virtual appliance on VMware or online as a cloud computing solution. The technology’s unmatched speed, scalability, flexibility and ease of use helps customers like JP Morgan Chase, Verizon, Mozilla, Comcast, Level(3) Communications and Vonage capitalize on business opportunities in real time. Vertica is headquartered in Billerica, Mass. For more information, visit the company’s Web site at www.vertica.com.

See Vertica in Booth # 202 at TDWI

Source: Vertica

Ed Marshall of Beaupre & Co. Public Relations, for Vertica Systems, +1-603-559-5816, emarshall at beaupre.com