OpenText Vertica vs. ParAccel

As someone just starting out with data analytics and warehousing vertica is a great tool for a small scale business. It has amazing performance and can scale upto TBs of data. It works well for any organization which has about 100 - 500 DAUs of the system. The system doesn't require a lot of ops overhead. Scaling for PB data and 1000s of DAU is vertica's weak point. The system is just not designed for large scale usage and still has a long way to go to improve scalability. There are experiments to run Vertica query engine on top of HDFS which seem promising, however - if you have the the Hadoop ecosystem you are better off going the HDFS + Presto/Impala/SparkSQL route. But if you are in the Hadoop ecosystem, you probably are already investing a lot in ops.

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[Actian Matrix is well suited for:] 1. Power user who wants to derive aggregate metrics by joining huge dataset. 2. Batch load where you have to load billion of records very fast (copy command). 3. Scenario where you want to do ELT because your ETL tool cannot handle huge volume of data.

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• Column-oriented storage organization, which increases performance of queries.
• Compression, which reduces storage costs and I/O bandwidth. High compression is possible because columns of homogeneous datatypes are stored together and because updates to the main store are batched.
• Shared nothing architecture, which reduces system contention for shared resources and allows gradual degradation of performance in the face of hardware failure.
• Easy to use and maintain through automated data replication, server recovery, query optimization, and storage optimization.
• Support for standard programming interfaces ODBC, JDBC, ADO.NET, and OLEDB.
• Integration to Hadoop with the capability to perform analytics on ORC and Parquet files directly.

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• Data loading is excellent
• ParAccel support is the best I have seen so far.

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• One time, one of the nodes wasn't coming up because of some ambiguity with the local data. Vertica wasn't able to fix it by itself and we were trying to remove the node out of the database and we couldn't do it. It would be great if that could be addressed. Luckily when we rebooted the whole server, some of the dead transaction got flushed because of which vertica was able to recover and the node came up.

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• Its a new product, there are plenty of bugs to work out with regards to converting special reserve characters that might crop up in data.
• The Matrix 2 Matrix database port tool needs some ironing out.

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I wish to give higher rating for the speed and efficiency in handling the queries, but only 6 because of consistent bugs we encounter

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HP/Micro Focus Vertica support is in par with other bigger vendors. In addition to this, there is enough best practices documentation available for some of the most common ways you will use Vertica that makes it easy to get Vertica up and running.

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• Faster initial response
• Trained professionals
• Very helpful in resolving issues

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Leader failover setup is the toughest and lack of proper documentation is making things tough.

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MySQL and MS SQL Server are both fantastic RDBMS products. MS SQL Server goes a bit further since it has the builtin analytical functions. But it only scales so far. Once the data goes beyond capacity, getting results out just does not happen anymore. IBM Netezza and Teradata were both appliances that required different expertise than we had in house. Vertica was able to do the same, and in some cases better, on commodity hardware (frankly in our case old servers that were slated for recycling!) and at a small scale. In other words, Vertica we could grow slowly over time. Infobright is a great log processing database but for the functions we were looking to serve it just didn't have some of the features Vertica had that we felt were show stoppers.

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Actian Matrix is our first big data analytics storage platform, and as I was not involved in the POC process to compare it to other products out on the market, unfortunately I cannot say if it is better than other Big Data storage options. I can say that it out performs products such as Oracle or UDB in regards to the volume of data it can easily index and handle.

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• Vertica increased our productivity in analyzing the data and validating simple proof of concepts with our data.
• Results of analytical queries produced from Vertica are used by all departments as well as part of some of our products.

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• ROI is great, less spending on full time DBA and that money could be use to add additional node.
• Negative - Not many developers are well aware of this tool, it takes some time to learn.

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