Vertica database K-safety

Failure recovery in Vertica is based on the distributed nature. This unique future takes advantage of the K-safety of the database(if any node fails will not cause the database to shut down and when the node comes back online and rejoins the database, it recovers its lost objects by querying the other nodes)

This represents the fault tolerance adminted in the database cluster.

So K represents the numbers of copies of data. For instance if your K-safe level is K-1 this means that you have an extra copy of data per each table and a total of two copies of data. If your K-safe level is K-2 then you will have a total of 3 copies of data for each table.

Your database must have a minimum number of nodes to be able to have a K-safety level greater than zero. For a better understanding use the following table to guide you.