Vertica, an HP Company, announced the Vertica Community Edition, a free version of its Vertica Analytic Database software (Oct. 18, 2011).
The Vertica Community Edition provides much of the functionality of the enterprise-level Vertica Analytics Platform, allowing a broader base of users to leverage Vertica software, especially for academic and research initiatives. As a no-cost offering, the Vertica Community Edition software will be limited to 1 terabyte of raw data, a three-node cluster size and Community Support only.
Vertica provides Columnar Storage & Execution.
Unlike traditional database vendors, Vertica’s columnar orientation was deliberately designed into the core of the platform. This means that all Vertica components are columnar-aware so that it delivers superior compression and encoding, better and more efficient relational join performance, and the engine is able to operate on this compressed columnar data without having to unpack it.
End-users interface with Vertica the same way they would with any other RDBMS.
Read more about Vertica platform here.