Vertica is an OLAP database, originally designed when a “beefy” server had 16GB of memory and 8 CPUs, and a 5TB data warehouse was considered to be HUGE.

A lot has changed since then. Though CPUs have gotten only a bit faster there are more cores on a die. Applications are commonly run in virtualized environments these days. Data volumes have ballooned, multi-petabyte databases are becoming more common. We’ve enjoyed the challenge of re-architecting Vertica to keep pace.

In this talk we’ll first give a brief overview of Vertica including some of the architectural pillars originally defined by Stonebraker et al. Next, we’ll briefly explore hardware and data center changes that have happened since the founding of Vertica. Finally, we’ll examine elements of Vertica’s Execution Engine (EE) that have been redesigned in response to these changes.

This talk is part of the Vaccination Database (Second Dose) Tech Talk Seminar Series.

Bio:
Stephen Walkauskas is the Director of Engineering at Vertica.

More Info: https://db.cs.cmu.edu/seminar2021-dose2#db8