Greenplum Single-Node Edition — sometimes free is a real cool price
Greenplum is announcing today that you can run Greenplum software on a single 8-core commodity server, free. First and foremost, that’s a strong statement that Greenplum wants enterprises to pay it for Greenplum’s parallelization/”private cloud” capabilities. Second, it may be an attractive gift to a variety of folks who want to extract insight from terabyte-scale databases of various kinds.
Greenplum Single-Node Edition:
- Is free of charge, although you can buy support.
- Has no restrictions on use, production or otherwise.
- Has no restrictions on database size.
- Is closed-source.
For those who want free, terabyte-scale data warehousing software, Greenplum Single-Node Edition may be quite appealing, considering that the main available alternatives are:
- General-purpose open-source DBMS, such as PostgreSQL and MySQL (lacking analytic DBMS performance and features)
- Infobright Community Edition (the other best choice – Infobright’s commercial sales success indicates the solidity of Infobright’s technology)
- Rough research-project code and other other questionable open source offerings
- Crippleware from other commercial analytic DBMS vendors (e.g., Teradata)
For example, comparing PostgreSQL-based Greenplum with PostgreSQL itself, Greenplum offers:
- The ability to scale out queries across all cores in your box (and no, pgpool is not a serious alternative)
- Storage alternatives such as columnar (I am told that EnterpriseDB recently stopped funding a project for a PostgreSQL columnar option)
Greenplum would surely also argue that its software is superior to PostgreSQL in parallel load, compression, MapReduce integration, and general fit-and-finish. I imagine that in some (perhaps not all) cases it would be right. PostgreSQL’s main technical advantages over Greenplum would probably lie in the area of datatype extensibility.
The main target users for Greenplum’s Single-Node Edition are obviously individual enterprise power users or very small analytic teams. I.e., it’s people with a data mart need that a central data warehouse isn’t meeting. Potential benefits to Greenplum include:
- Adding value to its Enterprise Data Cloud story
- Seeding the market for future enterprise sales
- Depriving competitors of revenue, perhaps at enterprises too small to ever be paying Greenplum customers
In addition, I see free Greenplum as a charity offering that could be appealing to scientists who face PostgreSQL performance limitations.
Related links
- Greenplum Free Single-Node Edition press release (I’m quoted)
- MySQL Performance blog on MonetDB and Infobright community edition
- PostgreSQL’s restriction to one core per query
- Infobright’s restriction to one core per query
Comments
14 Responses to “Greenplum Single-Node Edition — sometimes free is a real cool price”
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Wow, that’s very interesting. I’m definitely going to give this a test run to see how it matches up against LucidDB.
I think InfoBright’s ICE version (if I recall the name correctly, the freebie version) is not really an option without any DML right?
You can find out more about Infobright Community Edition here:
http://www.infobright.org/doc/specifications/
and information about our Enterprise Edition here:
http://www.infobright.com/Products/Features/
Don’t believe such a move can provide a big value. How this is different from just running PostgreSQL on the single server for free? Also who is the competitor greenplum is going to Deprive? Are you pointing to EnterpriseDB?
There’s a world of difference between running Greenplum and vanilla PostgreSQL for analytical queries. PostgreSQL is a great database, but on an 8 core box, each PostgreSQL query will only consume a single core and use 1/8th of the box. Greenplum will parallelize the query across all 8 cores, just like it can parallelize queries with linear scalability across many 100s of cores with the MPP edition.
As i posted on the greenplum forum : it’s GREAT for learning and evaluation purpose.
As a DBA, i highly appreciate the 900+ pages greenplum documentation. But it’s even better when you can *use* the software related to the documentation 🙂
And there is a LOT of difference between greenplum and postgresql (just read the first few page about SQL conformance of greenplum).
Running greenplum on a single octocore node can be good… as long as you’re not IOBound 🙂
Unlike infobright there is a large user community providing production like scripts for Greenplum at http://www.gpdba.com.
Having been a Netezza PS partner, and having worked for Dataupia, I know how much work goes into making Postgres suitable for ‘big data’ use. There are real Greenplum differentiators in there when compared to Postgres (see Curt’s article).
This is a very smart move by Greenplum from my perspective. The ability to scale-out from SMP to MPP when/if the need arises is very powerful, and not something many companies can offer.
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