HP has released Vertica Analytic Database 5.0, the latest version of its flagship parallel columnar database. While the update has many new features, the new SDK that accompanies the database is particularly significant. “We’ve opened up our platform so you can not only execute the SQL you want to execute, but you can write your own custom methods,” explained HP’s Colin Mahony. “We’re exposing the same environment that our developers get to work with when they add new features and functions. You get the ease of use and flexibility with SQL with the performance and extensibility of a programming language.”
The SDK offers a number of benefits, such as eliminating the need to move data into a data warehouse before performing analytics and making it easier to write programs in parallel environments. In addition, “a lot of our customers have taken fairly large MapReduce libraries and converted them to run inside Vertica without much effort,” Mahony said. “People can seamlessly move data and analytics back and forth between Vertica and Hadoop.”
For now, Vertica supports only C++, but other programming languages may be added in the future.
