August 4, 2009

FlexStore and the rest of Vertica 3.5

Today, Vertica is announcing its 3.5 release, timed in line with a TDWI conference. Vertica 3.5 is scheduled to go into beta test in mid-August and be released to general availability in early October. Vertica 3.5 highlights include:

And Vertica 3.5 surely includes some lesser features as well.

Like Teradata Virtual Storage, Vertica FlexStore wants to partition data among different parts of storage automatically. But, unlike Teradata’s technology, it will grudgingly let you do it by hand if you insist. Since Vertica installations seem to generally have only one kind of disk each — and that kind spinning rather than solid-state — early tests concentrate on allocating data among the inner and outer tracks of a disk. Vertica said that one typically gets 80% of the benefit by dividing the data into just two partitions, and 90% of the benefit if one divides it into three. However, I don’t recall getting a clear estimate of just how large that benefit is.

Comments

11 Responses to “FlexStore and the rest of Vertica 3.5”

  1. PAX Analytica? Row- and column-stores begin to come together | DBMS2 -- DataBase Management System Services on August 4th, 2009 6:52 am

    […] Vertica 3.5 introduces what Vertica calls “FlexStore.” A key part of FlexStore is the ability to store data not just in pure columnar format, but also to group columns together in what amounts to sub-rows. This is advantageous when data is retrieved together and, I presume, when it is updated. There’s a tradeoff in giving up column stores’ compression advantages, however, and use of this feature is not recommended for columns that are frequently retrieved independently. Vertica also notes that since it typically uses 1 megabyte block sizes, any table smaller than that shouldn’t be broken into columns at all. […]

  2. Vertica’s version of MapReduce integration | DBMS2 -- DataBase Management System Services on August 4th, 2009 6:53 am

    […] with Omer Trajman of Vertica Monday night about Vertica’s MapReduce integration, part of its Vertica 3.5 release. Highlights […]

  3. Balaji on August 4th, 2009 11:26 am

    Well, I AM puzzled. It was stonebraker who critisized MapReduce a while ago and went feature by feature comparing Hadoop MapReduce implementation with DBMS … and now comes full circle to adopt MapReduce into a DB … WOW. Interesting. But in a way it is good because when MapReduce has been successfully implemented by Aster and Greenplum who are Row based, it was a matter of time before some column based jumped into using this trick. I expected ParAccel…but it is Vertica. Great job vertica team !

  4. Curt Monash on August 4th, 2009 11:56 am

    For starters, Stonebraker != Abadi != Vertica. Beyond that, we’re talking about a bunch of very smart men and women, and if evidence leads them to tweak their opinions, then they’re open to doing so.

  5. Omer Trajman on August 4th, 2009 11:56 am

    Thanks Balaji – we’ve been getting lots of customer interest in MR and specifically hadoop. It’s a great community to be involved with.

  6. Ashwin Jayaprakash on August 4th, 2009 10:16 pm

    @Balaji – That’s true. Good that you pointed it out. They were so vocal against MapReduce and a month later they have this 🙂

  7. Ashwin Jayaprakash on August 4th, 2009 10:21 pm

    This is all very confusing. Daniel Abadi works on VoltDB. Isn’t he also the same guy who is working on HadoopDB – MapReduce?

  8. Schubert Zhang on August 12th, 2009 1:44 pm

    Column Grouping.
    Bigtable’s column family is a good abstraction.

  9. Bill Walters on August 25th, 2009 5:07 pm

    For starters, Stonebraker != Abadi != Vertica. Beyond that, we’re talking about a bunch of very smart men and women, and if evidence leads them to tweak their opinions, then they’re open to doing so.

    Yes Stonebreaker is entitled to change his opinion. The problem is that he spent a great deal of time and energy bashing, and invalidating the other opinions before he changed his own. That makes him a hypocrit and you an apologist for his hypocrisy

  10. Curt Monash on August 26th, 2009 4:41 am

    “Bill”,

    Unless you’re personally acquainted with some or all of Mike Stonebraker, Dave DeWitt, Daniel Abadi, and Vertica execs — and unless you’ve talked about MapReduce with some of them — you don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.

  11. 混合储存与压缩 | Alex的个人Blog on November 10th, 2011 4:12 am

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