OpenText Vertica vs. Presto

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.

Incentivized

Simple stories & templates work nicely - like for our Insider program. Stories that include a lot of images may be challenging to create & have look appealing.

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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.

Incentivized

• Linking, embedding links and adding images is easy enough.
• Once you have become familiar with the interface, Presto becomes very quick & easy to use (but, you have to practice & repeat to know what you are doing - it is not as intuitive as one would hope).
• Organizing & design is fairly simple with click & drag parameters.

Incentivized

• 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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• Presto was not designed for large fact fact joins. This is by design as presto does not leverage disk and used memory for processing which in turn makes it fast.. However, this is a tradeoff..in an ideal world, people would like to use one system for all their use cases, and presto should get exhaustive by solving this problem.
• Resource allocation is not similar to YARN and presto has a priority queue based query resource allocation..so a query that takes long takes longer...this might be alleviated by giving some more control back to the user to define priority/override.
• UDF Support is not available in presto. You will have to write your own functions..while this is good for performance, it comes at a huge overhead of building exclusively for presto and not being interoperable with other systems like Hive, SparkSQL etc.

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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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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.

Incentivized

I think Presto is one of the best solutions out there today at the cutting edge for interactive query analysis. One of the challenges is presto is a niche tool for the interactive query use case and doesn't have the knobs and whistles as much as Spark. In the foreseeable future if they are able to make presto work without the need for Hive, solving all the gaps it could be game changing and can be a direct threat to spark

Incentivized

• 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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• Presto has helped scale Uber's interactive data needs. We have migrated a lot out of proprietary tech like Vertica.
• Presto has helped build data driven applications on its stack than maintain a separate online/offline stack.
• Presto has helped us build data exploration tools by leveraging it's power of interactive and is immensely valuable for data scientists.

Incentivized