Analysis at Scale
December 04, 2017
Analysis at Scale
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Vertica
Vertica is our data warehouse. We use it for analysis of our internal business as well as the marketing results of our clients. Due to the size of our data, without Vertica analysis at this level would not be possible.
- Analytical querying due to built in analytical functions that actually perform across TB of data.
- Ingestion of data. We can send billions of rows to Vertica easily via the WOS system and it is ready for use immediately.
- Efficient storage of data. What raw is TB of data, once ingested into Vertica only takes up GB of disk space.
- Management! The management console is intuitive and useful making keeping an eye on your cluster easier than any other product like this I have used.
- Deletion is tough in Vertica. Because one of our larger fact tables is rapidly changing we have a need to run purges on a regular basis. Those purges can take a day and delays the other processes while that is happening. It would be nice if when I hit delete, it really deleted.
- Permissions on table manipulation is a bit lacking. In order to edit a table structure you have to be the owner, ie the creator, of the table. It means setting up true administrators who can maintain each other's work is tough.
- For our internal business we have insights we could never have had without Vertica. We can actually see where our money is coming from and point our marketing and sales strategies in the correct direction thereby returning far more than we pay.
- For our customers we can offer services they had been begging for. Before implementing Vertica we had no insight on a client's marketing across all their activities because the data was just too large. Now, there is no question we can't answer.
MySQL and MS SQL Server are both fantastic RDBMS products. MS SQL Server goes a bit further since it has the builtin analytical functions. But it only scales so far. Once the data goes beyond capacity, getting results out just does not happen anymore. IBM Netezza and Teradata were both appliances that required different expertise than we had in house. Vertica was able to do the same, and in some cases better, on commodity hardware (frankly in our case old servers that were slated for recycling!) and at a small scale. In other words, Vertica we could grow slowly over time. Infobright is a great log processing database but for the functions we were looking to serve it just didn't have some of the features Vertica had that we felt were show stoppers.