The Business Intelligence Blog

Pay-as-you-go in the Data Warehousing and Business Intelligence space is getting some more traction as Vertica moves its technology to Amzon’s Elastic Compute Cloud infrastructure computing infra-structure.

Vertica’s database organizes data by columns, as opposed to rows. The company and others that make columnar databases, such as Sybase and ParAccel, contend the approach is faster and better for BI-related queries because only the desired columns — such as a customer’s name or location — can be read without having to parse through an entire table, saving bandwidth.

The company also sells the database for on-premises use and in appliance form.

It sees a market for the on-demand offering due to a number of scenarios. For example, a company might want to conduct a BI project that will only last a fixed period of time, such as revising its pricing based on competitive and market data, said Andy Ellicott, senior director of marketing.

Hedge funds, which test their trading algorithms against large sets of historical stock market data, are another potential use case, because while such entities manage vast amounts of money, they seek to maintain the lowest possible overhead, which a cloud-based approach can provide, he said.