MySQL vs Teradata vs Vertica comparison

MySQL is an open-source relational database management system (RDBMS) owned by Oracle. Before Oracle acquired the product, it was completely free for users. After the merge, the solution started offering paid services with more features, alongside a free version. MySQL can easily integrate with a wide variety of programming languages, which makes it one of the most flexible and reliable products among its competitors. This cost-effective solution helps users deliver high-performance and scalable database applications through several products. They include:

• MySQL HeatWave: This is an in-memory query accelerator for MySQL. It is a parallel, columnar, hybrid query-processing engine with algorithms for distributed query processing. This database service is used for transactions, analytics, and machine learning (ML). It offers simplified, secure real-time analytics. It can be deployed on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), Amazon AWS, Azure, and users' data centers.
  
  
• My SQL Enterprise Edition: This edition of the solution includes the most comprehensive set of advanced features, technical support, and management tools. The combination functions achieves security, scalability, reliability, and uptime, while reducing risk, cost, and complexity, in managing MySQL applications.
  
  
• MySQL Standard Edition: This edition utilizes industrial-strength performance and reliability to help users deliver high-performance and scalable Open Transaction Processing (OLTP) applications.
  
  
• MySQL Classic Edition: This is an embedded database for independent software vendors (ISVs), original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), and value-added resellers (VARs), that are developing applications using the MyISAM storage engine.
  
  
• MySQL Community Edition: This is the free version of the product, which is supported by a large active community of open-source developers.
  
  
• MySQL Cluster CGE: This is a distributed database that combines linear scalability and high availability. It offers in-memory real-time access across partitioned and distributed databases.
  
  
• MySQL Embedded: This product offers MySQL as an embedded database and is most widely used by ISVs, OEMs, and VARs. It is utilized for making applications, hardware, and appliances more competitive by bringing them to market faster while lowering their cost of goods sold (COGs).

My SQL Features

The characteristics of each MySQL edition differ depending on what it offers and what clients it is catered towards. But the main features of the product include the following:

• Internals and portability: These capabilities allow MySQL to work on multiple platforms and provide transactional and non-transactional storage engines. This set of features is tested with Purify, Vilgrind, and a broad range of different compilers.
  
  
• Data types: Due to the flexibility of the data types feature of MySQL, the product is compatible with a very wide variety of data types, including fixed-length and variable-length string types.
  
  
• Statements and functions: This feature allows MySQL full operator and function support. It supports a wide variety of functions and allows users to refer to tables from different databases in the same statement.
  
  
• Security: The security features of MySQL provide users with a flexible privileged password system that enables host-based verification. The product offers encryption of all password traffic when users connect to a server.
  
  
• Scalability and limits: MySQL supports large databases with up to approximately 50 million records and up to 64 indexes per table.
  
  
• Connectivity: The connectivity features of the product allow clients to connect to MySQL using several protocols, providing them with freedom of choice in terms of which ones to use.
  
  
• Localization: Through this feature, the product offers availability to users in many languages. The server time zone can be changed dynamically and allows clients to specify their own time zone for their convenience.
  
  
• Clients and tools: The product includes several client and utility programs among its capabilities.

MySQL Benefits

MySQL brings many benefits to organizations that use it for their data. The most common ones include:

• Due to its initial open-source nature, MySQL is an easy to understand and beginner-friendly product.
  
  
• The solution still supports an open-source version as well, which means users can download, use, and modify it based on their requirements.
  
  
• MySQL ensures the consistency of data by storing it efficiently and minimizing redundancy.
  
  
• This is considered one of the fastest solutions on the market, a fact which is backed by many benchmark tests.
  
  
• MySQL is very flexible and supports a large number of embedded applications.
  
  
• The solution is compatible with many operating systems.
  
  
• This product offers clients the option to roll back transactions, as well as commit, and crash recovery.

Reviews from Real Users

According to a database engineer at a retailer with more than 10,000 employees, MySQL is a great open-source product that offers great scalability and compatibility.

Yong S., a solutions specialist, system integration, appreciates this product because it has different licensing options and is easy to set up.

Teradata is a multi-cloud data platform company that provides data warehouse and relational database tools. The brand has an extensive portfolio of big data analytic solutions, integrated marketing applications, and services. The products that Teradata offers can be categorized in the following ways:

• Software: The products in this category include Teradata Vantage, an advanced SQL engine and Teradata database.
  
  
• Cloud: The solutions can work with popular cloud services such as Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, and VMware. Teradata Cloud and customer cloud are also included in this product category.
  
  
• Ecosystem management: The products in this section include IntelliSphere, business continuity manager, data lab, data mover, data stream, QueryGrid, and viewpoint.
  
  
• Hardware: This category includes backup, archive, and restore (BAR) and IntelliFlex.
  
  
• Applications: Master data management (MDM) and Teradata analytics for enterprise applications are the two products in this category.

One of the most popular and commonly used products by Teradata is Teradata Vantage. This is a connected multi-cloud data platform for enterprise analytics. The product unifies data lakes, analytics, and data warehouses, as well as data sources and types. The solution offers its customers scalability, which allows them to scale dimensions to handle massive workloads of data. Teradata Vantage utilizes artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to power more models and enhance quality.

Through Vantage Console, businesses can benefit from role-based, no-code software to organize and manage their data. The product offers deployment on many popular public clouds, on premises, and on commodity hardware. Teradata Vantage unifies and integrates all data types from sources and provides companies with a single source of information. It achieves this by supporting all common data types and formats. The product also provides organizations with tools for monitoring, analyzing, and connecting data throughout the organizations.

Part of this product is also VantageCloud, which offers a modern cloud-native architecture as well as hybrid and multi-cloud deployment options. This solution offers new ways for clients to deploy their platforms. These include the next-generation, cloud-native architecture of Teradata VantageCloud Lake.

Teradata Features

The different products that Teradata offers have various features which facilitate data management for customers. Some of the key capabilities of the solutions offered by Teradata include:

• Connectivity: Users can benefit from connections to the mainframe or network-attached systems. The product provides its own extension for interaction with data stored in the tables. It also supports SQL.
  
  
• Linear scalability: Teradata solutions are highly scalable and linear. The solution can handle large volumes of data effectively while also supporting the ability to scale up to 2048 nodes.
  
  
• Load and unload utilities: The product offers features to move data in and out of the product's system effectively.
  
  
• Mature optimizer: Part of this feature is Teradata Optimizer, which is an advanced product that can handle up to 64 joins in a single query.
  
  
• Robust utilities: The solution includes multiple robust utilities in this category of features that facilitate data handling in and out of the product's systems. The tools include MultiLoad, FastLoad, and FastExport.
  
  
• Shared nothing architecture: This set of features, connected to the architecture of Teradata, is known as “shared nothing architecture” because the nodes, processors, and disks all work independently. These capacities ensure better value for a given task.
  
  
• Unlimited parallelism: These features divide large volumes of data into smaller processes that are executed in parallel. This contributes to the execution of complex tasks in a timely manner.

Teradata Benefits

Through its multiple solutions, Teradata offers various benefits for its clients. Some of these include:

• The solution facilitates prototype creation and offers faster times for completion.
  
  
• Through Teradata, users are able to use faster, simpler, and easier solutions for data-related tasks.
  
  
• The product eliminates the need for unnecessary data movement, which contributes to performance improvements.
  
  
• Teradata offers developers the ability to decide where in the architecture different parts of an application run.
  
  
• Teradata allows database administrators to manage databases from a single point of control.
  
  
• The solution provides the option to get the same data on multiple deployment options.
  
  
• The product supports Online Analytical Programming (OLAP) functions, which allows it to perform a complex analytical process of data.
  
  
• Teradata uses the Service Workstation to provide a single operation view for the multi-node system of the product.

Reviews from Real Users

Martin P., a services manager at Bytes Systems Integration, describes Teradata as a product that is very fast with good database control and excellent support.

Blaine V., principal at Insight Data Consulting, rates Teradata highly because of its excellent native features, highly stable, and impressive automation.

Vertica is a deploy-anywhere SQL database created for elasticity, speed, and advanced analytics. Vertica enables today’s busy teams to modernize their data warehouses, democratize data and analytics to enable increased access, and deploy analytics in a hybrid cloud environment. Additionally, Vertica merges how companies power their analytics by providing a scalable, open, and elastic database with numerous intuitive features.

In today’s marketplace, organizations are experiencing continued robust growth of data volumes, and citizen data scientists’ broader use of analytics is causing many companies to re-visit and re-examine their systems in order to match the demands of an aggressive marketplace. Analytics are continually swiftly evolving. New data from social media, blogs, IoT sources, data streams, gas and electrical grids, and mobile networks is being constantly gathered in extensive data sets. This presents organizations with a new opportunity to become more data driven, and they must be able to manage the new data growth and identify the trends and sequences that can lead to both improved business opportunities and continued repeat business from their clients.

Vertica Benefits:

Vertica has many valuable key benefits. Some of its most useful benefits include:

• Efficiency:  Vertica provides robust compression and intuitive impressions. This results in users requiring significantly less storage and hardware than other comparable data analytics solutions. The progressive Vertica architecture results in queries that are 10-50 times faster than other platforms while providing more storage data per server.
• Integration: Each new iteration of Vertica is tested and certified with the latest ETL and visualization tools. It actively supports Java Database Connectivity (JDBC), Open Database Connectivity (ODBC), and popular SQL providers. All these solutions and most leading BI and visualization tools interact seamlessly, making Vertica overall a very cost-effective solution and solid business investment.
• Cloud flexibility: With Vertica, users do not have to get locked into a single cloud vendor. Users are able to take complete advantage of the current infrastructure that is already in place. Vertica seamlessly integrates with popular public clouds, including Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Azure, AWS, Alibaba, VMware clouds, and more. It also provides for easy portability across on-premise and multi-cloud environments and data lakes. Vertica designs a robust flexible platform for running a company’s analytical and computing workloads, which allows applications to run simultaneously on numerous environments in a hybrid cloud infrastructure. Vertica is able to seamlessly use public clouds and private data centers, and it grants the flexibility to switch in an instant.
• Security: Vertica offers dynamic end-to-end security with support for partner solutions and industry-standard protocols such as Apache Sentry, AWS IAM, Kerberos, LDAP, and more. Vertica utilizes an intuitive layered security model that provides multiple security authentication authorization mechanisms. Vertica will also maintain an audit trail, natively exported to other security domains for analysis and persistence. 

Reviews from Real Users

“I am using Vertica for aggregations and dashboards. The most valuable feature of Vertica is the ability to receive large aggregations at a very quick pace. The use case of subclusters is very good.” - Bijal S., Group Chief Technology Officer at Netcore Solutions

“The hardware usage and speed has been the most valuable feature of this solution. It is very fast and has saved us a lot of money.” - Munkhsaikhan B.,  Project Lead - Digital Transformation Unit at Bodi Electronics LLC