Agrawal - HP Vertica essentials : learn how to deploy, administer, and manage HP Vertica, one of the most robust MPP solutions around

Rishabh Agrawal is currently working as a senior database research engineer and consultant at Impetus India. He has been tinkering with databases since 2010 and has gained expertise in a variety of NoSQL, massively parallel processing (MPP), and relational databases in the Big Data domain in a short span of time. A MongoDB Certified DBA, he has working knowledge of more than 20 databases, namely Cassandra, Oracle NoSQL, FoundationDB, Riak, Gemfire, Gemfire XD, HBase, Hive, Shark, HP Vertica, Greenplum, SQL Server 2008 R2, and so on. His primary focus areas are research and evaluation of new and cutting-edge database technologies and consulting with clients on the strategic use of diverse database technologies.

When not at work, he revels in photographing vivid subjects, playing badminton, writing poems, and dancing. You can connect with him on LinkedIn at in.linkedin.com/pub/rishabh-agrawal/15/ab4/186.

I would like to acknowledge Impetus (India) that provided me valuable time and resources for creation and completion of this book. I would also like to thank my reviewers and editors (from Packt Publishing) for making sure that this book comes closest to perfect. Last but not least, I will eternally remain indebted to my parents for keeping me inspired and being a pillar of strength in my life.

Mr. Yagna Narayana Dande is currently working as a Lead QA Engineer at Collective Media. He has been involved in large-scale testing projects for several years and has exposure to top technologies for both automated and manual testing in functional and non-functional testing. He has worked with both well-established MNCs and startups.

"Software testing is a passion" is the motto that drives his career.

He is mentioned in an acknowledgement in the book TestNG Beginner's Guide by Packt Publishing for his great contribution towards reviewing the book.

He has contributed to many fields such as server provisioning, ad serving, and Big Data, including Hadoop and distributed filesystems. He writes interesting test domain articles on his blog>.

I thank my parents, Venkata Reddiah and Padmavathi, for their constant support.

Nishant Garg has more than 13 years of software architecture and development experience in various technologies, such as Java, Java Enterprise Edition, SOA, Spring, Hibernate, Hadoop, and Hive; NoSQL databases such as MongoDB, CouchDB, Flume, Sqoop, Oozie, Spark, and Shark; and MPP databases such as GreenPlum, Vertica, Kafka, Storm, Mahout, and Solr/Lucene.

He received his MS in Software Systems from Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani, India, and currently works as a Technical Architect in Big Data R&D Group within Impetus Infotech Pvt. Ltd.

Nishant has also previously worked with some of the most recognizable names in IT services and financial industries, employing full software life cycle methodologies such as Agile and Scrum. He has undertaken many speaking engagements on Big Data technologies and is also the author of the book Apache Kafka , Packt Publishing .

Stephan Holler currently serves as the Regional Sales Manager for Vertica, HP's answer to enterprise's Big Data. He is responsible for overlooking all sales activities in the DACH region.

Prior to that, he worked as an Enterprise Account Manager (Sales) in HP Networking. His responsibility was to drive business in networking hardware. In fiscal years 2011 and 2012, he successfully served more than 150 commercial accounts in Germany.

In his former role, he acted as a senior business development consultant overseeing all business activities for the Microsoft Solutions Practice in Germany. His duties were generating revenue for Microsoft's services portfolio, starting from SharePoint to Dynamics CRM solutions.

Back in 2007/2008, he was appointed as the leader for the B2C Backend Integration unit within the e-commerce practice EMEA. His responsibilities ranged from team management to generating new business for a large German retailer.

He began his career with EDS (now HP) in 1998 and progressed through multiple assignments ranging from project manager to various roles in delivery and consulting, and has much client-facing experience in retail, telecommunication, and manufacturing, amongst others. This progressed to leadership roles including portfolio management in EMEA, where he was responsible for enabling sales teams to sell a portfolio-driven approach.

Having helped clients in numerous industries, he has a deep understanding of how information technology can be applied to support client business objectives. His unique experience across the sales and delivery life cycle enables the effective creation of solutions to support client demand for better business outcomes.

Pranabesh Sarkar is a technology evangelist on database technologies. He has extensive experience in the IT industry in many facets of data processing and database systems implementation and development, including analysis and design, database administration and development, and performance tuning. He has worked extensively on many database technologies across multiple platforms and possesses expansive knowledge on RDBMS (Oracle, MySQL, and PostgreSQL), MPP databases (Greenplum, Vertica, and Stado), NoSQL database systems (Cassandra, MongoDB, and HBASE), and Big Data technologies including Hadoop/Hive, Shark, Spark, and so on.