Vertica, an HP company, has announced the availability of Vertica 5.0, the latest version of the MPP columnar Vertica Analytics Platform.
The Vertica Analytics Platform analyzes data on a massive scale, with several customers analyzing more than a petabyte of data in real time, according to the vendor. In particular, Vertica 5.0 offers a new software development kit (SDK) that provides the ability to customize and insert customer- and use case-specific query logic into the Vertica database for fully parallel execution.
"One of the things that we have always been on is our industry-leading performance," Scott Howser, vice president of product marketing, HP Vertica, tells 5 Minute Briefing. "The three tenets of Vertica have been its speed, scalability and simplicity and we have continued to further the industry-leading aspects of all three of those tenets of the system."
According to Howser, with the new SDK as well as enhanced in-database analytics, HP Vertica provides yet greater extensibility for customers, and greater simplicity for executing more advanced analytics against structured, semi-structured and unstructured data.
The new release was in development prior to the acquisition of Vertica by HP in February 2011, Howser said.
As part of the 5.0 release, Vertica provides:
- A software development kit: Vertica 5.0 provides users, developers and partners with a robust SDK to write custom methods for analyzing data directly in the Vertica database. Users can implement MapReduce and other user-defined functions through standard SQL queries.
- Enhanced native in-database analytics: Extending Vertica's implementation of standard SQL, new advanced native SQL analytic functions include Geospatial, Event-Series Pattern Matching, Event-Series Joins, and Advanced Aggregate Statistical and Regression.
- Performance improvements: Extending Vertica's lead in real-time analytics for real-world applications, Vertica 5.0 delivers performance enhancements throughout the Vertica Analytics Platform in areas such as subqueries, database statistics, lifecycle management, query optimization, data resegmentation and join filtering.
- Manageability enhancements: Responding to the availability needs of mission-critical analytics at petabyte scale, Vertica 5.0 offers features that yield unique operational and disaster recovery capabilities while providing performance advantages as data replicas are fully available. In addition, Vertica's backup capabilities have been expanded with greater operational flexibility and improved performance.
- Elasticity and cluster cloning: Vertica 5.0 delivers enhanced elasticity features that enable dynamic expansion and contraction of clusters over 20x faster in every deployment scenario - cloud, virtual and physical - allowing users to quickly create additional capacity as needed. In addition, Vertica 5.0 offers full cluster cloning capabilities for on-demand creation of Vertica databases for any workload with auto-sizing and auto-tuning across different topologies and physical designs. This allows users to quickly spin off subsets of their databases for analytical sandboxes or focused analysis of complex data.
"Vertica has been known for its ability to handle structured, unstructured and semi-structured data," observes Vertica's Mingsheng Hong. With the release of Vertica 5.0, Vertica aims to extend its theme of "Analytics Everywhere" - enabling customers to leverage their business-critical data from a range of sources to make better informed decisions.
More information about Vertica 5.0 is available from Vertica.