Introduction

The Vertica® Analytic Database is an innovative, ground-up implementation of a relational database management system that is optimized for read-intensive workloads. The Vertica® Analytic Database (referred to as Vertica from this point) provides extremely fast ad hoc SQL query performance, even for very large databases, making it well suited for:

• Data warehousing
• Data marts
• Clickstream analysis
• Fraud detection
• Call detail analysis
• Consumer customer analytics
• Business intelligence
• Other query-intensive applications

Data Warehousing

A data warehouse is a relational database that is designed for query and analysis rather than transaction processing. Data warehouses:

• are often subjected to a heavy load of periodic and ad-hoc queries.
• contain historical information that enables analysis of correlations and trends over long periods of time.
• integrate data from various production (transactional) databases. Extraction, transformation, and loading (ETL) software converts the data to a common format and copies it into a data warehouse at regular intervals.

  ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) is a process in data warehousing that involves extracting data from outside sources, transforming it to fit a specific schema, and ultimately loading it into the database.

• typically consist of one or more star or snowflake schemas.