Head in Cloud, Vertica Taps Amazon for Online Database ServiceHead in Cloud, Vertica Taps Amazon for Online Database Service

Adding another database to the fast-growing and increasingly crowded cloud computing market, Vertica today announced the Vertica Analytic Database Cloud Edition. Hosted on Amazon's Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2) infrastructure, the database-as-a-service offering is aimed at firms seeking a flexible and low-cost way to test and deploy analytic applications demanding the lightning-fast query speeds of a column-store database. The service starts at $2,000 per month for 500 gigabytes of data with no long-term contracts required.

There's no shortage of database capacity available as a service. On-demand application vendors Salesforce.com and LongJump offer hosted databases as part of their SaaS platforms. Trackvia and Intuit Quickbase target small- and midsize-businesses with simple databases. EnterpriseDB appeals to larger companies with its PostgreSQL-based Cloud Edition (also hosted on EC2). And then there's Microsoft, which is currently beta testing SQL Server Data Services. What sets Vertica's new offering apart is that it will be one of the few high-performance analytic databases and the first column-store database to be offered on demand.

"Getting started with a column-oriented database is now even easier because you don't have to invest in any hardware up front," says Andy Ellicott, Vertica's senior director of marketing. "One of our target customers is people who want to explore the benefits of column-oriented databases without the cost, risk and wait involved in deploying the technology in house." Unlike a conventional databases that store data in rows, column-oriented databases (such as those offered by Sybase, Sand Technology, ParAccel and Vertica) store vertically. In the case of a customer database, for example, the column-oriented database stores all the first names, all the last names, all the cities, all the zips and so on down the columns. While the row approach is well suited to OLTP (online transaction processing) with lots of writes for each new customer transaction, the column-store is ideal for OLAP (online analytical processing), with lots of reads against particular attributes, like zip codes and product SKUs. As long as the queries aren't attribute intensive, column-store databases deliver faster query performance than row-store databases.

Vertica's Cloud Edition will reportedly be as secure, quick-to-load and scalable as its behind-the-firewall software and appliance (meaning into the hundreds of terabytes), but executives expect the sweet spot for the hosted offering to be in the one- to three-terabyte range. That seems to be at odds with the high-volume processing capabilities of the database, but Ellicott says on-demand users will likely focus on more transient information rather than building long-term data stores.

"One segment this will appeal to is analytic software-as-a-service companies, because they want to offer differentiated analytic performance over the Web," says Ellicott, who cites Vertica customers Sonian, a digital archiving startup, Mochi Media, an online ad network, and VMS Info, a media monitoring service, as ideal potential customers. "They have their startup capital, and they would rather not invest it in a data center, which is a huge expense."

Vertica's only direct competitor in the cloud computing market is the UK-based data warehouse appliance vendor Kognitio, which late last year introduced what it calls "Data Warehousing as a Service." While both vendors are targeting the data warehousing crowd, Ellicott says Vertica's advantage is in the column-store database (versus Kognitio's row-store DB) and in its hosting partner. "Their offering is in their own data center, so it comes down to whom do you trust, Kognitio or Amazon?"

Amazon reports that some 370,000 developers use Amazon Web Services including EC2, and according to Erick Schonfeld, co-editor of TechCrunch, "the biggest customers in both number and amount of computing resources consumed are divisions of banks, pharmaceuticals companies and other large corporations who try AWS once for a temporary project, and then get hooked."

Amazon also offers a cloud database in SimpleDB , but as the name suggest, that product is not intended for the kinds of complex, analytic applications eyed by Vertica.