Comments on: Oracle and Vertica on compression and other physical data layout features

By: Aster Data 4.0 and the evolution of “advanced analytic(s) servers” | DBMS2 -- DataBase Management System Services

Sat, 31 Oct 2009 01:57:53 +0000

[...] eschew RAID, instead doing mirroring in its own software. (Other examples of this strategy would be Vertica, Oracle Exadata/ASM, and Teradata Fallback.) Prior to nCluster 4.0, this caused a problem, in that [...]

By: Curt Monash

Curt Monash — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 00:45:03 +0000

@Greg,

As for Seth’s paper — I like the guy, so I won’t post anything more about it beyond my original harsh words on Twitter.

By: Curt Monash

Curt Monash — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 00:33:31 +0000

@Greg,

Evidently, you think Vertica is lying through its teeth as to what its products do or don’t do. (This would by no means, of course, be the first time a vendor has done such a thing …)

I have a simple suggestion, then. Vertica’s product is freely available for download. Why don’t you download it, check it out for yourself, and blog about what you discover?

By: Greg Rahn

Greg Rahn — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 23:10:04 +0000

@Curt

I agree – I’m not trying to dwell on the past so an answer on how it works in the current (whatever number that is or will be) release is acceptable.

FWIW my info seems to agree with what Seth Grimes has in this paper:
http://www.sybase.com/files/White_Papers/Sybase-IQ-Competitive-Assessment-070209-WP.pdf

By: Curt Monash

Curt Monash — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 22:49:03 +0000

@Greg,

Fair enough.

On the other hand, Omer has already posted saying what Vertica does. There’s only so much you can reasonably demand of a competitor in outlining what their prior releases, by way of contrast, did not do.

By: Greg Rahn

Greg Rahn — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 22:02:43 +0000

@Curt

I (and surely other readers) would be interested in the long answer. I will say that I am doubtful that my information is several releases old. IIRC it is based on version 3.0 which at this point may be several releases old, but probably less than 6 months old.

By: Curt Monash

Curt Monash — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 20:05:54 +0000

@Greg,

I happen to be on the phone w/Omer again at the moment. Short answer to your comments is that your news about Vertica seems several releases old.

By: Greg Rahn

Greg Rahn — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 14:48:32 +0000

@Omar

By “automatic tuning” you mean running the external admin tool versus the default or auto choice of the compression type for a column in the DDL, correct? As I understand it, the automation is in the recommendation and the optional implementation of that recommendation (for projection choice and column encoding type). It still requires that a DBA perform those tasks, which are not necessarily difficult tasks, but none the less tasks that need to be done.

By: Omer Trajman

Omer Trajman — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 14:03:42 +0000

Vertica’s automatic tuning does indeed recommend various encoding types including RLE. It can run at any point – prior to, during or after load and after workloads or as data change over time.

Manual tuning is always available and we chose to use manual tuning for the ETL benchmark.

By: Curt Monash

Curt Monash — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 18:21:18 +0000

@Greg,

Vertica absolutely gives a manual tuning option.

However, as I understand from the company it doesn’t REQUIRE manual tuning.

Neither of those should be surprising. The devil, of course, is in the details — how much manual tuning is typically called for.