SQL Server - VertiPaq Engine Renamed as xVelocity in SQL Server 2012.

VertiPaq engine is currently only available to PowerPivot for Excel in SQL Server 2008 R2. After the amazing success of PowerPivot for Excel in the previous release of SQL Server 2008 R2 this engine moved to the server side with the same InMemory BI and compression and it’s called the VertiPaq Engine or the Analysis Services Tabular Mode. Data retrieval and calculations happen at a much faster rate as its entire database is in-memory.Vertipaq enables Excel to process hundreds of millions of rows with sub-second response times on desktop hardware.

Now Along with the SQL Server 2012 launch, Microsoft announced xVelocity in-memory technologies, delivering huge performance improvements for data warehousing and business intelligence. This engine uses in-memory column-oriented storage and innovative compression techniques to achieve these remarkable results.

xVelocity is not a new feature, but rather a renaming of an existing feature.  Vertipaq is the existing feature that will now be called xVelocity.  So the Vertipaq engine that is inside PowerPivot and Analysis Services 2012 Tabular is now called “xVelocity in-memory analytics engine”.  Also, “xVelocity” now refers to the column store index feature in the SQL Server 2012 relational database.

Columnar database is its driving principle So First Column bases storage as opposed to “row store” & Secound High level of compression, all in memory – RAM based. In SQL Server 2012, Microsoft has taken the same Vertipaq engine and integrated it into Analysis Services. The results have been staggering with scan rates up to 10s of billions of rows per second on typical server hardware. 

Using a combination of compression, algorithms enhanced for modern CPU/memory architecture, and highly parallel intra-query execution, xVelocity can speed up query execution times by 4x, 10x, and even 100x, simply by adding column store indexes to the fact tables of a star-schema data warehouse.

Suhas Kudekar