Start-up Vertica goes after database market with column-oriented system

Technology enhances business intelligence querying, company says

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.

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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.

Vertica's software, designed for Intel-based hardware running Linux operating systems, has 50 customers worldwide including Comcast and JPMorgan. Typical deployments cost between $100,000 and $200,000, with customers being charged on a per-terabyte basis, company officials say.

Palmer says Vertica's customer base is concentrated in the financial services and telecommunications industries. Changes in Version 2.0 include new session management interfaces, handling of large result sets, greater compression, and faster responses for complex queries. Vertica claims the DBMS is 10 to 200 times faster than competitors.

"It's way better and faster than we anticipated," Palmer says.

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