- Mythbuster busts his own tale
- 10 open source companies to watch
- Sony recalls 73,000 Vaio laptops
- Tool to evade China's Web censorship
- Chrome and Firefox and add-ons
Newsletters | Podcasts | Chats | Opinions | RSS Feeds | This Week In Print | IT Careers | Community | Reports | Downloads | Slideshows | New Data Center
Partner Sites:App Performance | On Demand Security | Networking Solution | SOA | Value of WDS
Database start-up Vertica on Tuesday publicly launched its column-oriented relational database management system, an architecture some analysts believe is better suited to handle business intelligence and certain other tasks than traditional row-oriented databases pioneered by vendors such as Oracle.
Vertica started talking publicly a year ago, announcing $23.5 million in venture funding and putting its SQL database into beta testing. Vertica had put the finishing touches on the product's first version by last September, but didn't seek any media attention until Tuesday when it announced Version 2.0. This version of the Vertica Analytic Database will become generally available in March.
CEO and co-founder Andrew Palmer says Vertica wanted to get more feedback from customers and tweak the product based on their concerns before trying to promote the database.
Forrester analyst Boris Evelson thinks Vertica is in a good position to take on the rapidly growing volumes of data in the enterprise today with its system that stores content by column rather than by row.
Oracle and IBM designed their database systems decades ago specifically for transaction processing, and not really for business intelligence or reporting that supports decision-making, he says. These established vendors have realized the importance of querying and business intelligence over the past decade and modified their products with indexes, partitioning, and temporary tables for sorting and filtering. But this process can triple the size of the data, which becomes a problem when dealing with large data sets and thousands of simultaneous users, Evelson says.
Column-oriented systems, such as those built by Vertica, perform more effective compression and don't need extra space to build indexes because each column acts as an index, he says. Within the next five years, Evelson predicts column-oriented databases "will overtake traditional row-oriented databases for business intelligence and decision support."
Vertica's not alone in making a column-oriented database management system. Sybase IQ, KX, ParAccel, SAND Technology and InfoBright are competitors in this area.
Vertica's other co-founder, Michael Stonebraker, was the main architect of the Ingres and Postgres database management systems. Former Oracle senior vice president Jerry Held is Vertica's executive chairman, and former Oracle president and COO Ray Lane has served as a special adviser to Vertica.

It's safe to say that most companies, if presented with hard numbers on their energy consumption...
Secure Wireless Printing OptionsDiscover how you can reduce the TCO of your wireless printers in this whitepaper. Learn how to...
Tuning ERP and the Supply Chain for Profitable GrowthThe supply chain is, of course, the primary processing mechanism of every manufacturing company....

Double-Take (r) Software and Microsoft are teaming up on September 9, 2008 for a webinar focusing...
PoE Plus: Impact on the PoE MarketThe standard for Power over Ethernet (PoE), IEEE Std. 802.3af(tm)-2003, advanced networking,...
Harnessing the power of communications to increase workplace performanceDue to the convergence of IT and telecommunications technologies, the business workplace has been...

Increasingly popular technologies such as virtualization, wireless networking and data center...
Virtualization Reality CheckFind out why analysts say approaching virtualization with an ounce of caution is wise. And also why...
Closing the Loop: Extending Wireless LAN Security to Wireless PrintersEnterprises cannot overlook wireless printers when assessing network security. The print jobs and...
Partner Content
CA Network & Voice Resource Center
Comprehensive Network & Voice Management Visit CA Network & Voice Management Resource Center and get insights into industry best practices, information that helps you to address your challenges.
CA Network & Voice Management Resource Center
Managing Voice Over IP for Successful Convergence
Voice over IP (VoIP) has much to offer in cost savings but some customers have concerns about VoIP call quality compared to the quality of traditional voice services. This white paper will help you learn how to take the right steps so that voice quality is assured.
Managing VoIP for Successful Convergence
The Changing Face of Network Management
Managing your network is serious business. This paper discusses the benefits of integrating configuration change-awareness into your network fault management solution
Download Whitepaper
Comments (1)
Sybase Files Lawsuit Against VerticaBy Anonymous on June 28, 2008, 10:33 amSybase has filed a federal patent infringement lawsuit against Vertica. This will make it impossible for Vertica to indemnify their potential clients in their...
Reply | Read entire comment
View all comments