Re: OLAP

On Tue, Aug 27, 2013 at 3:04 PM, Jerry Sievers <gsievers19(at)comcast(dot)net>wrote:

> Vertica is another case of an analytics focused platform that dirived
> from Postgres, version 8.0 IIRC.
>

FWIW,
You might be thinking of Greenplum, and I think it forked from pg 8.1.
Vertica was built from scratch, it is not using Postgres as the basis for
the db. This is according to the engineers that I have spoken to in the
past at Vertica. I believe there was some code ported over for their
command line client "vsql", but I could be wrong about that. At the very
least, vsql looks and acts like psql from a user's point of view.

I agree absolutely with you about the dazzling speed of certain types of
queries -- one of my tests was a simple aggregate query (a bunch of SUM()
and GROUP BY's) over about 500M rows and it returned results in a handful
of seconds. The same query in our Postgresql server with 2x the number of
disks took handfuls of minutes IIRC. On the flip side, I found some of the
complex Window functions performed on par or better in Postgresql than in
Vertica.