The Vertica Analytics Platform supplies enterprise data warehouses with big data analytics capabilities and modernization. Vertica is owned and supported by OpenText.
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Snowflake
Score 8.9 out of 10
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The Snowflake Cloud Data Platform is the eponymous data warehouse with, from the company in San Mateo, a cloud and SQL based DW that aims to allow users to unify, integrate, analyze, and share previously siloed data in secure, governed, and compliant ways. With it, users can securely access the Data Cloud to share live data with customers and business partners, and connect with other organizations doing business as data consumers, data providers, and data service providers.
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.
If you need a quick query, snowflake is the way to go. It's super simple and scalable; we were struggling before with Azure, and with Snowflake, everything runs smoothly, and we have more control over our schemas and warehouses. Snowflake, in my opinion, is the next step when you want to scale your business and manage data. If your company is still small, there may be cheaper options.
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.
Snowflake scales appropriately allowing you to manage expense for peak and off peak times for pulling and data retrieval and data centric processing jobs
Snowflake offers a marketplace solution that allows you to sell and subscribe to different data sources
Snowflake manages concurrency better in our trials than other premium competitors
Snowflake has little to no setup and ramp up time
Snowflake offers online training for various employee types
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.
Do not force customers to renew for same or higher amount to avoid loosing unused credits. Already paid credits should not expire (at least within a reasonable time frame), independent of renewal deal size.
SnowFlake is very cost effective and we also like the fact we can stop, start and spin up additional processing engines as we need to. We also like the fact that it's easy to connect our SQL IDEs to Snowflake and write our queries in the environment that we are used to
The interface is similar to other SQL query systems I've used and is fairly easy to use. My only complaint is the syntax issues. Another thing is that the error messages are not always the easiest thing to understand, especially when you incorporate temp tables. Some of that is to be expected with any new database.
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.
We have had terrific experiences with Snowflake support. They have drilled into queries and given us tremendous detail and helpful answers. In one case they even figured out how a particular product was interacting with Snowflake, via its queries, and gave us detail to go back to that product's vendor because the Snowflake support team identified a fault in its operation. We got it solved without lots of back-and-forth or finger-pointing because the Snowflake team gave such detailed information.
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.
Snowflake provides various features, such as integration with Python using Snowpark. The reporting feature that caters to your small reporting needs is Snowsight. The Snowflake data marketplace is where you can get multiple data for free and even some of the data which you can buy according to your needs. And the integration options with various tools like Sigma are add-ons.
