Health Catalyst Late-Binding Data Warehouse vs. Vertica Analytics Database

Vertica as a data warehouse to deliver analytics in-house and even to your client base on scale is not rivaled anywhere in the market. Frankly, in my experience it is not even close to equaled. Because it is such a powerful data warehouse, some people attempt to use it as a transactional database. It certainly is not one of those. Individual row inserts are slow and do not perform well. Deletes are a whole other story. RDBMS it is definitely not. OLAP it rocks.

Incentivized

• Extremely fast query performance - Vertica is one of the fastest query engines out there.
• Scales to TBs - Scales reasonably well up to 10-20 nodes and 10 - 100s of TB of data.
• Easy to Use - Fairly easy to user, we made quite some headway with just 1 person running it for a while.

Incentivized

• Could use some work on better integrating with cloud providers and open source technologies. For AWS you will find an AMI in the marketplace and recently a connector for loading data from S3 directly was created. With last release, integration with Kafka was added that can help.
• Managing large workloads (concurrent queries) is a bit challenging.
• Having a way to provide an estimate on the duration for currently executing queries / etc. can be helpful. Vertica provides some counters for the query execution engine that are helpful but some may find confusing.
• Unloading data over JDBC is very slow. We've had to come up with alternatives based on vsql, etc. Not a very clean, official on how to unload data.

Incentivized

I haven't had any recent opportunity to reach out to Vertica support. From what I remember, I believe whenever I reached out to them the experience was smooth.

Incentivized

Vertica performs well when the query has good stats and is tuned well. Options for GUI clients are ugly and outdated. IO optimized: it's a columnar store with no indexing structures to maintain like traditional databases. The indexing is achieved by storing the data sorted on disk, which itself is run transparently as a background process.

Incentivized

• Positive impact on ROI by being able to get customer insights in real-time.
• Positive ROI through reduced time to set-up and maintain Vertica instances.

Incentivized