InfoWorld's top 10 tech startups for 2008

Innovative technologies and new spins for existing technologies characterize this year's hot tech newbies

 

Hot tech startup: Vertica

Founded: 2005

Tech breakthrough: Vertica combines a column-oriented data structure with a shared-nothing architecture plus aggressive compression to speed queries.

Business problem addressed: Pulling analytic information out of large databases takes too long.

What the technology does: Vertica's database is structured for analytics and data warehousing in environments with large amounts of non-transactional data. It generally runs with, not instead of, major OLTP databases such as Oracle. Queries run many times faster than in a traditional database.

How the technology works: Traditional databases organize information by row. Vertica organizes data into columns. Organization by column means that when a query needs to access just a few columns of a particular table, only those columns need to be read from disk. By contrast, in a traditional row-oriented database, all values in a table are typically read from disk, which wastes I/O bandwidth, says founder and CTO Michael Stonebraker, the main architect of Postgres and other database innovations. Because Vertica and, say, Oracle structure data differently, a company that oriented its data in a row-oriented database must first use an ETL (extraction, transformation and loading) application to match its data to the Vertica schema. After the old data is copied to Vertica, subsequent changes to the original database are trickled to the Vertica database.

Forward spin: Vertica has just launched a cloud-based offering of its database. Customers can now access, create, and run a Vertica database through Amazon’s EC2 computation service. Data may be stored in Amazon’s S3 storage cloud.

[ Read about all the InfoWorld 2008 hot tech startups. ]