Greenplum Software
 |
| Type |
Privately held |
| Founded |
2003 |
| Headquarters |
 San Mateo, California, United States |
| Key people |
Bill Cook, CEO
Scott Yara, President & Co-Founder
Luke Lonergan, CTO & Co-Founder
Mike Asher, Chief Financial Officer
Ronaldo Ama, Sr. VP of Engineering |
| Industry |
Data Warehouse technologies |
| Products |
Database Software, Professional Services, Customer Services |
| Website |
www.greenplum.com |
Greenplum is a database software company located in San Mateo, California and is a pioneer of Enterprise Data Cloud solutions for large-scale data warehousing and analytics. The Greenplum Database is built from modified PostgreSQL into a massively parallel processing (MPP) database.
Current developments include the addition of an analytic extension based on MapReduce, as well as an updated Column-Oriented Table feature as part of the Polymorphic Data Storage™ technology.
More recently, Greenplum announced the release of a Single-Node Edition, which offers data analysts access to a free version of the Greenplum Database.
History
Greenplum was co-founded in 2003 by Scott Yara, former VP for Sandpiper Networks, and Luke Lonergan, former CEO and founder at Didera[1].
Enterprise Data Cloud Initiative
Greenplum developed the Enterprise Data Cloud Initiative as the foundation for the next-generation database. This foundation gives each analyst or department within an enterprise individual control over their data. This latest innovation is embodied in Greenplum’s Enterprise Data Cloud™ initiative[2]
Technology
The Greenplum Database is based on the Open source database PostgreSQL. It utilizes a shared-nothing MPP (massively parallel processing) architecture that has been designed from the ground up for BI and analytical processing using commodity hardware. In this architecture, data is automatically partitioned across multiple 'segment' servers, and each 'segment' owns and manages a distinct portion of the overall data. All communication is via a network interconnect—there is no disk-level sharing or contention to be concerned with (i.e. it is a 'shared-nothing' architecture).
Most of today's general-purpose relational database management systems (e.g. Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server) were originally designed for Online Transaction Processing (OLTP) applications. These databases utilize 'shared-disk' or 'shared-everything' architectures that are optimized for high transaction rates at the expense of individual query performance and parallelism.
Greenplum Database's shared-nothing MPP architecture provides every segment with an independent high-bandwidth channel to its disk. The segment servers are able to process every query in a fully parallel manner, use all disk connections simultaneously, and efficiently flow data between segments as query plans dictates. The degree of parallelism and overall scalability that this allows far exceeds general purpose database systems.
Greenplum's Column-Oriented Table feature is a part of the Polymorphic Data Storage™ technology which provides flexibility to choose row- or column-oriented processing models. This technology enables the database to transparently abstract the details of any table or partition, allowing for a wide variety of underlying storage and execution models. Benefits include: - The ability to support row- and column-oriented tables in the same database, with unrestricted ability to join these tables efficiently.
This release introduces support for column-oriented tables, allowing users the flexibility to select row- or column-oriented processing for any table. Users simply specify ‘orientation=row’ or ‘orientation=column’ when creating a table. In either case the database pushes down column projection and fully parallelizes table scan and query processing. Both row- and column-oriented tables allow a range of compression settings – from light/fast through to deep/archival, and utilize industry-standard gzip and LZ compression algorithms.[3]
Platform Support
Greenplum Database is supported for non-production (development and evaluation) use on Mac OSX 10.5, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.2 or higher (32-bit) and CentOS Linux 5.2 or higher (32-bit).
Customers
Greenplum has over 75 customers in verticals ranging from Financial Services and Telco to Internet, Retail, Transportation and Pharmaceutical. [4] One of their largest and most prominent customers is eBay, is running a multi-petabyte system. Other Greenplum customers include companies such as Fox Interactive Media[5], NASDAQ, Zions Bancorporation, Reliance Communications, NYSE Euronext, T-Mobile, Sears, Sony and Skype. [6]
Competition
Greenplum's main competitors are higher-cost solutions from vendors such as Oracle and Teradata or proprietary data warehouse appliance vendors such as Netezza.
Products
- Greenplum Database
- Greenplum's Single Node Edition
Greenplum's release of a free version of Greenplum Database allows data analysts access to large-scale analytical projects outside the enterprise data warehouse (EDW). The Single-Node Edition is a paralleled analytic database, and can participate as a distributed node of Greenplum’s Enterprise Data Cloud, which allows for centralized management, data discovery and data sharing across databases.[7]
References
External links
