OpenText Analytics Database (Vertica)
Vertica is a columnar massively parallel analytics database that runs on-premises or in any cloud, in Enterprise mode with local storage or Eon mode with communal object storage and independently scalable compute.
LicenseCommercial
DeploymentSelf-hostedManaged
PricingFreeSubscription
Operational complexityHigh
Use it when
- On-premises requirements are real (regulatory, data gravity, existing hardware) but you still want object-store-separated compute; Eon mode runs on S3 or Pure Storage in your data center.
- Performance through physical design appeals: projections (compressed, encoded column layouts the optimizer picks between) reward deliberate tuning.
- The same database must run identically on-premises, on VMware, and on AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud.
- Kafka ingest with exactly-once semantics is needed out of the box.
Think twice when
- Nobody wants to design projections or operate clusters; the managed cloud warehouses trade that control away on purpose.
- Licensing by data volume (or node-hours) needs modeling against growth, as with any volume-priced system.
- The workload is elastic and bursty; even Eon subclusters are managed capacity, not a serverless meter.
How it runs
Self-managed (or via the Accelerator SaaS in your AWS account) in two modes: Enterprise couples storage to nodes; Eon keeps communal data in object storage with subclusters that start, stop, and scale independently, cached in a local depot. Database Designer proposes projections; resource pools govern concurrency. Time travel comes as epoch-based historical queries.
Details
CompareHow OpenText Analytics Database (Vertica) answers the questions Data Warehouses turns on.
Data Warehouses
| How it works | |
| Compute and storage | MPP: separated storage in Eon mode, coupled in Enterprise |
| Storage format | Proprietary projections; reads Parquet, ORC and Iceberg, exports to Iceberg |
| SQL dialect | Vertica SQL (PostgreSQL-derived) |
| Streaming ingest | Native: Kafka scheduler, exactly-once |
| Time travel | Historical queries AT EPOCH / AT TIME, back to the Ancient History Mark |
| Running it | |
| Where it runs | AWS, Azure, Google Cloud and VMware, or on-premises; Accelerator SaaS runs in your AWS account |
| Concurrent users | Resource pools set PLANNEDCONCURRENCY and MAXCONCURRENCY; Eon subclusters isolate workloads |
| Acceleration | Projections designed by Database Designer; live aggregate and top-K projections; Eon depot cache |
| Access | |
| Access control | Roles and grants with row and column access policies; LDAP or Kerberos auth, TLS |
| Cost | |
| Billing unit | Data volume licence per TB, or node-hour on cloud marketplaces |
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