Blog: Richard Hackathorn

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Mixing Old Wine in a New Wine Skin

In a briefing by Vertica today, I revisit a number of familiar database concepts, such as column-oriented store and data compression. The list of players involved with Vertica is very impressive, from Michael Stonebraker as founder and CTO to Don Haderle as an advisor. However, I wondered how a new DBMS vendor could emerge successfully in a market that is consolidating. The question that kept bugging me was...

What is new about Vertica that was not invented and commercialized decades ago?

It seems that the appropriate analogy is that of taking several old wines and blending them together in a new wine skin. Here are the old wines:

1) Column-oriented store, which is great on query performance but terrible on update/load performance
2) Data compression, which is great on size reduction (10% to 20% of the raw data) but terrible on compress/decompress processing
3) Multiple sort orders, which is great for forming multiple indexes for complex queries but terrible on duplicating data
4) Dual data spaces optimized for reading and writing respectfully, which is great for absorbing an update stream but terrible on the query engine to operate concurrently on two different structures.

Mixed thoroughly together and pour into commodity hardware running Linux. And I must say that the resulting wine was... well... fascinating.

Vertica has been quietly selling product for three quarters and has about 50 customers. Their pricing is solely based on data volume, rather than the number and size of processors. Current partnerships include Business Objects, JasperSoft, Informatica, Talend, and interestingly Hewlett-Packard.

Vertica is a company to watch and expect a launch of a second version sometime next year.

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