There is no question at this point that every enterprise application is going to have an embedded analytics capability. The real issue is what underlying set of technologies will be employed to provide that capability.
Now that Micro Focus has gained control over the Vertica columnar database from Hewlett-Packard Enterprise (HPE), it is making a more aggressive case for Vertica to provide those capabilities. Today, Micro Focus announced Vertica 9, the first update to the columnar database to be delivered by Micro Focus.
Vertica 9 brings with it support for additional machine learning capabilities as well as the ability to deploy Vertica on the Google Cloud Platform (GCP). Vertica previously supported public clouds from Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft. Vertica 9 also provides access to a beta release of a Vertica Eon Mode option that enables users to directly query data stored on an AWS S3 storage cloud. Vertica 9 also provides access to new model replication capabilities, data preparation functions, and embedded continuous workflows.
Finally, Micro Focus also announced integration between Vertica 9 and an instance of Microsoft Power BI software running on Azure.
Joy King, vice president of product management, product marketing and field engagement for Vertica, says Vertica 9 eliminates the need to move data to a separate platform to access analytics because all the machine learning algorithms are baked into the database.
“All the analytics are driven by machine learning,” says King.
Many application developers are relying on columnar database capabilities that have been added to a row-based relational system to access analytics. But King says there’s no substitute for the richness of the analytics capabilities provided by native columnar databases. Regardless of how analytics functions are accessed, the one thing that is for certain is that applications that don’t provide embedded analytics are not going to make any short-list when it comes time for consideration in the enterprise.
