Vertica announced today a new release of the Vertica Analytic Database, incorporating new features designed to increase performance and automate provisioning of computing resources. Vertica 4.0 is the latest version of the company's MPP columnar database, designed for large queries across large amounts of data.
The current release represents Vertica's steady march into the enterprise, offering more features to more users, Dave Menninger, vice president of marketing for Vertica, tells 5 Minute Briefing. Among the new features in Vertica 4.0 are in-database analytics, including SQL-99 window functions and new time-series and sessionization capabilities, that enable applications to perform sophisticated analytics in SQL without the need for specialized products or programming.
The new release also incorporates workload management features that enable customers to manage complex mixed query workloads. "We wanted to be able to support a mixed query workload at an enterprise level. But we were not so audacious to start out and think that our very first release can do that. Everything we've done is focused around analytics, and integrating into a standard SQL environment. Our path over the last couple of years has been to gradually expand the portion of the market and the application space that we can address with this technology."
In addition, Vertica 4.0 is designed to appeal to users with no prior knowledge of configuring columnar databases. "The fundamental shift here is that the parallelization within our system is now driven by the number of cores that you have, as opposed to the physical storage structures of your system," Menninger explains. "With this release, we removed that burden from the database administrator. We take on the responsibility for understanding how many cores there are in the system, and managing the workload to be associated with the number of the cores. That just means there are fewer knobs, and its easier for customers to use the technology."
The new release also incorporates web-based administration tools with integrated backup and restore, durable snapshots, and rapid recovery from disk failures.
For more information, visit the Vertica website.