SiliconANGLE’s theCUBE isn’t the only thing turning heads at Hewlett-Packard Co.’s third annual analytics conference in Boston this morning. The opening keynote saw the introduction of a new iteration of its widely-used columnar data store optimized to support real-time processing at massive scale.

The “Excavator” release of Vertica packs a specialized access layers developed in collaboration with Hortonworks Inc. that makes it possible to run structured queries directly against Hadoop up to ten times faster as before. The addition aims to give business users not familiar with the data crunching platform the quickly ability to access the fast-moving information their organizations keep inside while it’s still fresh.

That includes logs from the infrastructure supporting their work and the connected devices at the edge of the network, which HP is addressing with the inclusion of a new dedicated search function for machine-generated data in Excavator. It’s geared mainly towards practitioners in IT operations departments and companies like telecommunications providers with a lot of physical assets to track.

The log search capability is joined by a host of other specialized functions for handling everything from geospatial data to ad hoc queries. They all share the focus on speed underscoring the new release of Vertica, which is made possible through the support for Apache Kafka added in conjunction with the other enhancements.

The open-source message broker was originally developed at LinkedIn Inc. to facilitate the sharing of data among its different services and has since found wide-spread adoption among Hadoop users thanks to its high throughput and scalability. That makes the software particularly well to handle unstructured data, particularly the fast-moving kind. The integration will enable Vertica to interoperable much more effectively not only with the data crunching platform but other real-time workloads as well.

Rounding out the release are new management capabilities aimed at making it easier for organizations to take advantage of all that new functionality. Administrators can now leverage improved integration with their user directories to tighten restrictions on who can access what and configure alerts for operational problems to speed up detection.

Photo via HP