Vertica

Vertica looks to be a revolutionary database technology. In fact, you have to reach back far into database history to find a more important development. There are several features that make this conspiracy possible:

• Columns storage rather than row storage
• Column storage opens up the possibility for extreme compression
• Compression opens up the possibility for rapid access
• Compression also opens up the possibility for redundant copies of columns in different sort orders
• Redundant copies of columns in different sort orders opens up the possibility of a server grid that responds to queries
• Server grid opens up the possibility for self healing when one of the servers goes down
• Duplicate columns in different sort orders means no need for indexes

An impressive utility is DB Designer. It creates a database from four inputs:

• Schema
• Sample queries
• Sample data
• Target server configuration

The benchmarks are very impressive. Example application is call records at a cellphone service. Queries run 219x faster using 1/6th the disk space, using ordinary $5,000 commodity server compared to a conventional RDBS running on special $50,000 hardware.

Pricing for the Vertica software looks competitive.