OpenText Vertica vs. SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise (ASE)

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

We use this for an inbuilt security management system, where it performs well in a scaled setup with a large volume of live data with high availability. Also, the performance is up to the mark for the large statement flow. From a DBA perspective, a lot of parameters need to be fine-tuned for the specific environment needs, which can cause overhead. Expertise is limited, and the learning curve is steep for the SAP ASE.

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

• High availability and reliability.
• High performance.
• Monitoring of threshold based events.
• Security at multiple levels.
• Query plan optimization.
• Lock management.
• Access to HANA.

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

• A quick button for devs to switch instances into a dev mode (eliminating logs, and such).
• Licensing is far too complicated. Simplify pricing.

Incentivized

Our licenses are perpetual. It is the support that we will be renewing. We will renew because we continue to use and receive value from the product.

Incentivized

Well-suited in the security domain, high performance, and low latency of the DBMS. In terms of the DBA perspective, a dedicated monitoring tool (Cockpit) helps a lot in terms of managing the database, which helps in identifying bottlenecks during performance issues. Also, it helps us to send custom alerts related to Database activities.

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

Incredibly responsive, saving us countless hours in troubleshooting.

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

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

• Positive ROI.
• Ease of use with minimal training required to write high performance SQL (assumes a knowledge of SQL already).
• Ease of database administration.
• Sometimes upgrades can be difficult.
• Changing platforms can be difficult (changing say from SPARC to Intel).
• Changing operating systems can be difficult (changing from Solaris to linux).

Incentivized