June 11, 2010
Ingres VectorWise technical highlights
After working through problems w/ travel, cell phones, and so on, Peter Boncz of VectorWise finally caught up with me for a regrettably brief call. Peter gave me the strong impression that what I’d written in the past about VectorWise had been and remained accurate, so I focused on filling in the gaps. Highlights included:
- VectorWise is indeed a shared-everything analytic DBMS.
- The VectorWise front-end is Ingres. Ingres VectorWise supports almost all SQL that Ingres does (there are a few edge-case exceptions).
- Conversely, Ingres VectorWise doesn’t support any SQL Ingres doesn’t, most notably SQL-99 Analytics. Naturally, SQL-99 Analytics is a roadmap item for Ingres/VectorWise.
- Ingres VectorWise 1.0 is pretty purely columnar. There’s a bit of PAX, but it’s mainly automagic/under the covers. The one user-controlled exception I understood was that one can ensure that composite keys are stored together.
- The main Ingres VectorWise performance secret sauce ingredients we touched on were:
- Vectorization of operations (hence VectorWise’s name).
- Compression that is tuned for speed rather than to minimize storage utilization.
- We unfortunately didn’t have time to revisit the other big part of the Ingres VectorWise performance story, namely clever design for modern microprocessor architectures. High-level generalities about that do pervade the Ingres VectorWise press release, but – well, they’re very high level.
- Unlike Vertica but like most other columnar DBMS vendors, Ingres VectorWise wants you to store your data once. You can index-organize the data. You can also organize multiple tables in the same order, to make joins among them fast.
- Support for actual join indexes is an Ingres VectorWise roadmap item.
- As do ever more analytic DBMS, Ingres VectorWise has something akin to Netezza zone maps.
- When I asked Peter what had changed most from the initial VectorWise development plan, other than the above, he basically said that their performance priorities had shifted a bit. Specifically, he said.
- They had originally been “blinded” (his word) by the TPC-H benchmark, but figured out that they were overly focused on it. (Well, duh.)
- They learned about the importance of other things such as data loading speeds.
Categories: Actian and Ingres, Analytic technologies, Benchmarks and POCs, Columnar database management, Data warehousing, Database compression, Open source, VectorWise
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[…] After working through problems w/ travel, cell phones, and so on, Peter Boncz of VectorWise finally caught up with me for a regrettably brief call. Peter gave me the strong impression that what I’d written in the past about VectorWise had been and remained accurate, so I focused on filling in the gaps. Lire l’article […]
[…] which already owns VectorWise, is also buying ParAccel. The argument for why this kills VectorWise is simple. ParAccel does most […]