Greenplum Data Warehouse

We bumped into the Greenplum (then Metapa) founders at the TDWI event in Las Vegas about 5 years ago. The message was that they were planning an MPP version of Postgres. Given our favourable experience as early adopters of Netezza (another MPP Postgres play) this seemed like a welcome bit of news.

Initially touted as the 'Sun data warehouse appliance',Greenplum is a software only offering that runs on Linux (Red Hat, CentOS, SUSE) or Solaris x64. Supported hardware choices are Sun, HP, Dell or IBM.

Greenplum innovations include parallel support for MapReduce and the option to store data as columns rather than rows, as seems the current trend.

The Greenplum single node SMP edition was announced in Q4 2009. This is a free starter edition, with optional paid-for support, that can be scaled out to MPP as and when required. Quite a nice idea, we think.

The multi-petabyte Greenplum deployment at ebay is regarded as one of the largest commercial data warehouse deployments.

At VLDB we are long-term exponents of the shared-nothing MPP architecture. We have extensive real-world experience of MPP Postgres systems such as Netezza, Dataupia and now Greenplum.

We offer high-quality Professional Services to enure a smooth deployment and success for your data warehouse projects.

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