About a month ago, HP Vertica released its latest service pack, HP Vertica 6.1 Service Pack 2 (version 6.1.2). It may sound like a small release, but the service pack actually includes a couple of major changes that could have a dramatic impact on the way you use Vertica.
Enterprise Features Now Available in Community Edition
Community Edition and Enterprise edition now have complete feature parity. The only restrictions placed on Community Edition installations are a 1TB data limit and a maximum of three nodes. This means that Community Edition installations now have the ability to: backup & restore (including “copycluster” disaster recovery features), use the Vertica Management Console, run the workload analyzer, use geospatial functions, use the Informatica connector, and more.
Using Community Edition as a test/development cluster solution is now a viable option for any organization, as it now has all of the features of Enterprise Edition, but no license is required to install or use, as long as you do not exceed 1TB of data or more than three nodes.
A Radically Different Vertica Management Console
While it may not appear to be radically different on the surface, the underlying architecture of the Vertica Management Console has radically changed. These changes allow the Management Console to be far more stable and reliable, along with being more convenient to deploy. Here are just some of the improvements you’ll find in 6.1.2:
- Increased stability and performance
- Management Console no longer requires a standalone server (it can be installed on a node in the cluster)
- Management Console now retrieves data directly from the Vertica clusters you’ve configured (no longer uses an embedded, separate Vertica database)
- New charts have been added and improvements have been made to old charts
- Community Edition users (including those on Amazon Web Services) can now install and run Management Console
Full List of Changes
In addition to these major changes, Service Pack 2 also includes a number of smaller enhancements and fixes. View the full HP Vertica 6.1 SP2 Release Notes for a comprehensive list of changes.
