The Vertica Analytic Database: C-Store 7 Years Later

TL;DR

This paper discusses Vertica, a commercial analytic database inspired by C-Store, highlighting its architecture, performance, and successful commercialization of academic research.

Contribution

It presents the system architecture of Vertica, demonstrating how academic research can be effectively translated into a high-performance commercial product.

Findings

Vertica achieves high performance with a modern architecture.

Vertica maintains a classical relational interface.

The paper illustrates successful commercialization of research.

Abstract

This paper describes the system architecture of the Vertica Analytic Database (Vertica), a commercialization of the design of the C-Store research prototype. Vertica demonstrates a modern commercial RDBMS system that presents a classical relational interface while at the same time achieving the high performance expected from modern "web scale" analytic systems by making appropriate architectural choices. Vertica is also an instructive lesson in how academic systems research can be directly commercialized into a successful product.