Vertica is an MPP column-store analytics database that runs on clusters of Linux servers or in the cloud. The original configuration (Enterprise mode) distributes data and query execution among nodes (typically with duplication). A newer configuration (Eon mode) separates compute from storage and relies on S3 for storage.
Vertica is a columnar database designed for data warehousing. Vertica is based on C-Store, which was an academic project involving academic and entrepreneur Michael Stonebraker (a co-founder of Vertica, Ingres, VoltDB) and colleagues from Brandeis University, Brown University, MIT, and University of Massachusetts Boston.
As part of the C-store architecture table data is stored on disk in columns rather than in rows. Columns are stored independently of other columns and allow for increased compression on storage and decreased I/O during query operations.
Vertica has advanced analytical and machine learning functions built-in.
Vertica is designed to run on clusters of Linux nodes. A Vertica cluster runs in a MPP (Massive Parallel Processing) fashion, and it is designed to scale linearly by adding nodes to the cluster.
Vertica clusters can be deployed on premise (in Enterprise Mode) or in the cloud (in either Enterprise Mode or Eon Mode). Enterprise Mode consists of Vertica nodes that share compute and storage resources. Eon Mode is a cloud based mode in which there is a separation of compute nodes (AWS EC2 instances) and storage (S3). This separation of compute and storage allows for rapid scalability (adding or removing compute nodes) without the need to rebalance data across the nodes in the cluster.
Veritca was purchased by HP in 2011, and then acquired by Micro Focus as part of the HPE merger in 2017. As such, Vertica is sometimes referred to in old documentation and community posts as HP Vertica or HPE Vertica.
Vertica comes with a command line utility called vsql for connecting to the database.
