Saturday, October 24, 2009

Greenplum: Open Source Data Warehouse

By Zidni Agni

In 2005, Greenplum released an enterprise-level massively parallel processing (MPP) version of PostgreSQL called Greenplum Database. Greenplum Database is the industry's first massively parallel processing (MPP) database server based on open-source technology. It is explicitly designed to support business intelligence (BI) applications and large, multi-terabyte data warehouses.

Greenplum Database is the first open source powered database server that can scale to support multi-terabyte data warehousing demands. It is based on PostgreSQL, the most advanced open-source database available. This section explains Greenplum Database's similarities and differences as compared to PostgreSQL. Since that time, Greenplum continues to actively contribute to the PostgreSQL community by submitting features that make PostgreSQL a more robust open source database for Business Intelligence applications. Likewise, Greenplum benefits from the advances made by the PostgreSQL development community.

Greenplum was formed in 2003 by the merger of Metapa and Didera with the goal of developing a low cost, high-performance, large-scale data warehousing solution built on open source software. Greenplum is led by pioneers in open source, database systems, data warehousing, supercomputing, and Internet performance acceleration with technical staff from companies such as Oracle, Sybase, Informix, Teradata, Netezza, Tandem, and Sun. Greenplum company headquarters are in San Mateo, California.

By utilizing open source software and commodity, off-the-shelf hardware, Greenplum's vision is to make enterprise data as available and easy to use for business users as Web data is for consumers. Businesses need to make faster, more accurate business decisions to gain competitive advantage. The task of managing and scaling data for business reporting has traditionally been difficult and expensive, and in the past 20 years the database infrastructure on which business intelligence (BI) systems are built has not evolved significantly.

Greenplum recognizes that companies are moving to low cost computing and replacing proprietary, Unix-based hardware and software with Intel-based hardware running Linux. Greenplum's offerings are specifically designed to help companies take advantage of the price and performance returns of Linux.

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