Vertica-ML: Distributed Machine Learning in Vertica Database

A growing number of companies rely on machine learning as a key element for gaining a competitive edge from their collected Big Data. An in-database machine learning system can provide many advantages in this scenario, e.g., eliminating the overhead of data transfer, avoiding the maintenance costs of a separate analytical system, and addressing data security and provenance concerns. In this paper, we present our distributed machine learning subsystem within the Vertica database. This subsystem, Vertica-ML, includes machine learning functionalities with SQL API which cover a complete data science workflow as well as model management. We treat machine learning models in Vertica as first-class database objects like tables and views; therefore, they enjoy a similar mechanism for archiving and managing. We explain the architecture of the subsystem, and present a set of experiments to evaluate the performance of the machine learning algorithms implemented on top of it.