The newest version of the Vertica Analytic Database is now commercially available worldwide. New features support new types of analytics, improve the way queries are executed in terms of better utilization of computing resources, and internationalize the release. "When you look at these things in combination, it really broadens the addressable market that is available to Vertica," David Menninger vice president of marketing, Vertica, tells 5 Minute Briefing.
Vertica 4.0 is already delivering business benefits to some of the world's biggest financial services, communications, internet, healthcare and retail companies, according to the vendor. For example, customers who are tight on available computing resources are reporting Vertica 4.0 is helping them "do more with less" with a new workload manager that lets them manage complex mixed query workloads to best meet business priorities. Others who had no prior experience working with columnar databases are taking advantage of Vertica's new "load-and-query" data designer, which automatically generates optimized storage structures greatly simplifying development and tuning.
The Vertica Analytic Database 4.0 includes new features making the product simpler and faster. A new patent-pending database designer automatically delivers the full benefits of Vertica's performance, on any hardware platform, with the simplicity of an appliance. Vertica's purpose-built, modular MPP architecture enables rapid development of workload management and analytics including time-series and sessionization capabilities supporting a broader variety of applications, while the new patent-pending Optimizer and Execution Engine can boost the database's query performance by up to 400%, according to the vendor.
"Vertica is all about dealing with large amounts of data and processing those queries very quickly," states Menninger. "We came to market with a very focused approach; we did certain types of queries and certain types of applications very well as we started, and we broadened and broadened that mix until this point." With version 4.0, there is the ability to distribute workloads across different machines much more efficiently in any type of query, he explains. "Previously, some types of queries would not be distributed across the cluster; now we can distribute the workload and the queries of every query across the cluster."
Some of Vertica's internet company customers are using the database's Hadoop integration and new sessionization capability to analyze web clickstream data to identify valuable user patterns for applications such as fraud detection, ad selection and revenue prediction. "All of these different internet properties are trying to understand users' behaviors on their sites, and one of the things you have to be able to do is associate one set of activity with one ‘session.' " Menninger says, observing that many internet companies have had to do "analytical gymnastics" to figure out which clicks are part of one session and which are part of another. "We have built some of that right into the database so you can do it directly within the database."
Vertica 4.0 is also fully Unicode capable, supporting international data sets, collations and locales. For more information, go here.