Greenplum is being open sourced
While I don’t find the Open Data Platform thing very significant, an associated piece of news seems cooler — Pivotal is open sourcing a bunch of software, with Greenplum as the crown jewel. Notes on that start:
- Greenplum has been an on-again/off-again low-cost player since before its acquisition by EMC, but open source is basically a commitment to having low license cost be permanently on.
- In most regards, “free like beer” is what’s important here, not “free like speech”. I doubt non-Pivotal employees are going to do much hacking on the long-closed Greenplum code base.
- That said, Greenplum forked PostgreSQL a long time ago, and the general PostgreSQL community might gain ideas from some of the work Greenplum has done.
- The only other bit of newly open-sourced stuff I find interesting is HAWQ. Redis was already open source, and I’ve never been persuaded to care about GemFire.
Greenplum, let us recall, is a pretty decent MPP (Massively Parallel Processing) analytic RDBMS. Various aspects of it were oversold at various times, and I’ve never heard that they actually licked concurrency. But Greenplum has long had good SQL coverage and petabyte-scale deployments and a columnar option and some in-database analytics and so on; i.e., it’s legit. When somebody asks me about open source analytic RDBMS to consider, I expect Greenplum to consistently be on the short list.
Further, the low-cost alternatives for analytic RDBMS are adding up.
- Amazon Redshift has considerable traction.
- Hadoop (even just with Hive) has offloaded a lot of ELT (Extract/Load/Transform) from analytic RDBMS such as Teradata.
- Now Greenplum is in the mix as well.
For many analytic RDBMS use cases, at least one of those three will be an appealing possibility.
By no means do I want to suggest those are the only alternatives.
- Smaller-vendor offerings, such as CitusDB or Infobright, may well be competitive too.
- Larger vendors can always slash price in specific deals.
- MonetDB is still around.
But the three possibilities I cited first should suffice as proof for almost all enterprises that, for most use cases not requiring high concurrency, analytic RDBMS need not cost an arm and a leg.
Related link
- Greenplum revenue at EMC was problematic from the get-go.
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6 Responses to “Greenplum is being open sourced”
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Just wondering where is the code? 15 minutes of web surfing and cannot find a single reference on where the actual open sourced code is…
That, Camuel, is why I wrote “is being” rather than “has been”. 🙂
I am curious what will be a license? If something Apache compatible may be something,like smart columnar encodings, can be reused
I heard about the new since 2-3 weeks at a Pivotal Bug Data meetup. Nonetheless I agree, this is no solution for large concurent session, so at the maximum can be only an extra EDW – Enterprise DW candidate. I wonder, would be HP do the same with Vertica? Do you have data if they would support larger concurency? By the way, when you mention concurency, are you referibg to reads or writes or both?
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