February 7, 2008
Vertica update
I chatted with Andy Ellicott and Mike Stonebraker of Vertica today. Some of the content is embargoed until February 19 (for TDWI), but here are some highlights of the rest.
- Vertica now is “approaching” 50 paid customers, up from 15 or so in early November. (Compared to most of Vertica’s fellow data warehouse specialists, that’s a lot.) Many — perhaps most — of these customers are hedge funds or telcos.
- Vertica’s typical lag from sale to deployment is about one quarter.
- Vertica’s typical initial selling price is $250K. Or maybe it’s $100-150K. The Vertica guys are generally pretty forthcoming, but pricing is an exception. Whatever they charge, it’s strictly per terabyte of user data. They think they are competitive with other software vendors, and cheaper, all-in, than appliance vendors.
- One subject on which they’re totally non-forthcoming (lawyers’ orders) is the recent patent lawsuit filed by Sybase. They wouldn’t even say whether they thought it was bogus because they didn’t infringe, or whether they thought it was bogus because the patent shouldn’t have been granted.
- Average Vertica database size is a little under 10 terabytes of user data, with many examples in the 15-20 Tb range. Lots of customers plan to expand to 50-100 Tb.
- Vertica claims sustainable load speeds of 3-5 megabytes/sec/node, irrespective of database size. Data is sucked into RAM uncompressed, then written out a gig/node at a time, compressed. Gigabyte chunks are then merged on disk, which is superfast as it doesn’t involve sorting. (30 megabytes/second.) Mike insists this doesn’t compromise compression.
We also addressed the subject of Vertica’s schema assumptions, but I’ll leave that to another post.
Categories: Analytic technologies, Data warehousing, Database compression, Investment research and trading, Michael Stonebraker, Sybase, Theory and architecture, Vertica Systems
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6 Responses to “Vertica update”
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I’m very familiar with hedge funds have worked at one for almost 7 years (a top 25 fund).
10 tb is a lot of data for a hedge fund even if you’ve got both position by strategy/hedge by security
by tax lot by day and also keep it by prime brokerage account strategy security tax lot by day that’s
a lot of data but for the big guys for 5 years data I don’t see it close to 10 TD (and I’ve had my
nose buried in this for a good bit of the past seven years) The first by strategy by security is going
to be both wide and deep. The second at prime brokerage location is going to narrow and deep. It’s
extremely difficult if not impossible to do P&L at prime brokerage locations Margin is a different matter
and very important because managing that means managing your leverage.
If you’ve got anyone else doing DW/BI at hedge funds I’d be interestend in corresponding
As I understand it, this isn’t primarily for the hedge funds’ own transactions (although I’m sure those are stored too). Rather, it’s for historical market data, trade-by-trade. I.e., it’s for the algorithm-development part of algorithmic trading.
CAM
[…] vertica update 2 the author […]
You make a mention of the Sybase vs. Vertica lawsuit in your post. The lawsuit currently is against Vertica but may affect column store databases in general.
http://amrithkumar.wordpress.com/2008/04/06/sybaseiq-suit/
[…] outsourced data marts. But I also had the opportunity to follow up on a couple of points from February’s briefing, […]
[…] First of; Vertica is expensive! I found one post claiming typical initial selling price is $250K, ouch! Not really a product for startup or smaller […]