Greenplum
Analysis of data warehouse DBMS vendor Greenplum and its successor, EMC’s Data Computing division. Related subjects include:
- EMC, which bought Greenplum in 2010
- Data warehousing
- Data warehouse appliances
- PostgreSQL
Notes on data warehouse appliance prices
I’m not terribly motivated to do a detailed analysis of data warehouse appliance list prices, in part because:
- Everybody knows that in practice data warehouse appliances tend to be deeply discounted from list price.
- The only realistic metric to use for pricing data warehouse appliances is price-per-terabyte, and people have gotten pretty sick of that one.
That said, here are some notes on data warehouse appliance prices. Read more
| Categories: Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, Database compression, EMC, Exadata, Greenplum, Netezza, Oracle, Pricing | 8 Comments |
Notes on the EMC Greenplum Data Computing Appliance
The big confidential part of my visit last week to EMC’s Data Computing Division, nee’ Greenplum, was of course this week’s announcement of the first EMC/Greenplum “Data Computing Appliance.” Basics include: Read more
| Categories: Analytic technologies, Data warehousing, EMC, Exadata, Greenplum, Oracle, Parallelization, Storage | 1 Comment |
Notes and links October 10 2010
More quick-hit notes, links, and so on: Read more
| Categories: Analytic technologies, Aster Data, Data warehousing, Greenplum, Health care, Surveillance and privacy, XtremeData | Leave a Comment |
EMC/Greenplum notes
I dropped by the former Greenplum for my quarterly consulting visit (scheduled for the first week of Q4 for a couple of reasons, one of them XLDB4). Much of what we discussed was purely advisory and/or confidential — duh! — but there were real, nonconfidential takeaways in two areas.
First, feelings about the EMC acquisition are still very positive.
- Hiring has been rapid, on track to roughly quadruple Greenplum’s size over a 1 1/2 year period. These don’t seem to be EMC imports, but rather outside hires, although EMC folks are surely helping in the recruiting.
- The former Greenplum is clearly going to pursue more product possibilities than it would have on its own. This augurs well for Greenplum customers.
- Griping about big-company bureaucracy is minimal.
- I didn’t hear one word about any unwelcome product/business strategy constraints. On the other hand …
- … the next Greenplum product announcement you’ll hear about will be one designed to be appealing to the EMC customer base — i.e., to enterprises that EMC is generally successful in selling to.
| Categories: Data warehousing, EMC, Greenplum, MapReduce, Parallelization, Predictive modeling and advanced analytics | 4 Comments |
It can be hard to analyze analytics
When vendors talk about the integration of advanced analytics into database technology, confusion tends to ensue. For example: Read more
| Categories: Aster Data, Greenplum, Netezza, Predictive modeling and advanced analytics, SAS Institute | 7 Comments |
eBay followup — Greenplum out, Teradata > 10 petabytes, Hadoop has some value, and more
I chatted with Oliver Ratzesberger of eBay around a Stanford picnic table yesterday (the XLDB 4 conference is being held at Jacek Becla’s home base of SLAC, which used to stand for “Stanford Linear Accelerator Center”). Todd Walter of Teradata also sat in on the latter part of the conversation. Things I learned included: Read more
| Categories: Data warehousing, Derived data, eBay, Greenplum, Hadoop, HBase, Log analysis, Petabyte-scale data management, Teradata | 30 Comments |
Links and observations
I’m back from a trip to the SF Bay area, with a lot of writing ahead of me. I’ll dive in with some quick comments here, then write at greater length about some of these points when I can. From my trip: Read more
| Categories: Analytic technologies, Aster Data, Calpont, Cassandra, Couchbase, Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, EMC, Exadata, Facebook, Greenplum, HP and Neoview, Kickfire, NoSQL, OLTP, ParAccel, Sybase, XtremeData | 1 Comment |
Notes on EMC’s Greenplum subsidiary
I spent considerable time last week with my clients at both Greenplum and EMC (if we ignore the fact that the deal has closed and they’re now the same company). I also had more of a hardcore engineering discussion than I’ve had with Greenplum for quite a while (I should have been pushier about that earlier). Takeaways included:
- This is starting off as a honeymoon deal. Everything Greenplum was planning to do is being continued. Additional resources are being poured into Greenplum to do more.
- Some Greenplum execs seem to envision staying long term, some seem to envision moving on to their next startups. The ones who envision moving on are, however, going to work hard first to make the merger a success.
- Greenplum has, for quite a while, had more of an advanced analytics/embedded predictive modeling story than I realized. Bad on them for not fleshing it out more in marketing and product packaging alike.
- Greenplum both denies the concurrency problems I previously noted and also has a very credible story as to how it will eliminate them. 🙂 Seriously, Greenplum tells of one customer that routinely runs 150 simultaneous queries – on what I think is not a terribly big system — and a number of POCs (Proofs of Concept) that simulated similar levels of concurrency.
| Categories: Analytic technologies, Data warehousing, EMC, Greenplum | 1 Comment |
More on Greenplum and EMC
I talked with Ben Werther of Greenplum for about 40 minutes, which was my first post-merger Greenplum/EMC briefing. “Historical” highlights include:
- Ben says Greenplum wasn’t being shopped, by which he means Greenplum was out raising more capital and the fund-raising was going well. Note: Half or so of Greenplum’s deals were subscription-priced, so it had weaker cash flow than it would have if it were doing equally well selling perpetual licenses.
- However, joint engineering was also going well with, e.g., Greenplum CTO Luke Lonergan spending time at EMC facilities in Cork, Ireland. And one thing led to another …
- Greenplum has ~ 140 customers, vs. ~65 five quarters ago, 100+ at year-end, and an acquisition rate of 12-15/quarter last fall.
- A typical “small” paying customer for Greenplum starts with 10-20 TB of data.
- Greenplum Chorus isn’t generally available yet, with rollout energy being focused on Greenplum 4.0. Note: As important as it is for overall industry direction, Greenplum Chorus is a product which won’t be a terribly big deal in Release 1 anyway.
Highlights looking forward include: Read more
| Categories: Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, EMC, Greenplum, Market share and customer counts | 7 Comments |
EMC is buying Greenplum
EMC is buying Greenplum. Most of the press release is a general recapitulation of Greenplum’s marketing messages, the main exceptions being (emphasis mine):
The acquisition of Greenplum will be an all-cash transaction and is expected to be completed in the third quarter of 2010, subject to customary closing conditions and regulatory approvals. The acquisition is not expected to have a material impact to EMC GAAP and non-GAAP EPS for the full 2010 fiscal year. Upon close, Bill Cook will lead the new data computing product division and report to Pat Gelsinger. EMC will continue to offer Greenplum’s full product portfolio to customers and plans to deliver new EMC Proven reference architectures as well as an integrated hardware and software offering designed to improve performance and drive down implementation costs.
Greenplum is one of my biggest vendor clients, and EMC is just becoming one, but of course neither side gave me a heads-up before the deal happened, nor have I yet been briefed subsequently. With those disclaimers out of the way, some of my early thoughts include:
- I wish my clients would never buy each other, but it’s inevitable.
- I don’t think anybody evaluating Greenplum should be much influenced by this deal one way or the other. (Whether they will be is of course a different matter.)
- EMC tends to run its bigger software acquisitions in a fairly hands-off manner. There’s no particular FUD (Fear/Uncertainty/Doubt) reason why this deal should stop anybody from buying Greenplum software.
- I also don’t think adding a rich parent adds much of a reason to buy from Greenplum. But if you’re the type who’s nervous about smaller vendors — well, Greenplum now isn’t so small.
- Greenplum Chorus could, in principle, work with non-Greenplum DBMS. That possibility suddenly looks a lot more realistic.
- The list of analytic DBMS vendors with an appliance orientation is pretty impressive, including:
- Oracle, with Exadata
- Microsoft, partially
- Teradata
- Netezza
- Now EMC/Greenplum, at least partially
- Weaker players such as:
- The ailing Kickfire, which a client (not Kickfire itself) tells me is being shopped around
- The reeling HP Neoview
- XtremeData, but I’m still waiting to hear of XtremeData’s first real sale
- Greenplum is something of a specialist in large databases. EMC has to love that.
- Greenplum’s weakness is concurrency.
- Greenplum’s “polymorphic storage” is a good fit for a storage vendor with appliance-y ideas.
- And finally — I think that even software-only analytic DBMS vendors should design their systems in an increasingly storage-aware manner, and have been advising my vendor clients of same. I’ll blog that line of reasoning separately when I get a chance, and edit in a link here after I do.
Related links (edit)
- Here’s the promised post as to why analytic DBMS need to be ever more storage-aware.
- Dave Kellogg crunched the EMC/Greenplum numbers, coming up with an estimated valuation range of $3-400 million, the high end of which is rumored to be correct.
- Merv Adrian suggests the big EMC/Greenplum loser is ParAccel, a viewpoint which presumably presupposes that the EMC/ParAccel partnership was significant in the first place.
- I talked with Ben Werther and posted more about Greenplum and EMC.
| Categories: Data warehouse appliances, EMC, Greenplum, Storage | 13 Comments |