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
Greenplum et alia’s BigDataNews.com site
Greenplum recently started a website BigDataNews.com, and quickly signed up Aster Data as a co-sponsor. (Edit: As per a comment below, the decision to sign up additional sponsors was made by the site’s independent publisher.) It’s actually being run by Brett Sheppard, a former Gartner/DataQuest analyst who now gets involved in this kind of thing. (Brett and I may be working on another project soon, with Greenplum funding.)
The heart of the site is feeds* from a variety of high-profile blogs (DBMS2, Daniel Abadi’s, Joe Hellerstein’s, James Kobelius’, et al.), plus some additional posts written by Brett (primarily) or Greenplum folks. Highlights of Brett’s posts include:
- What I am told was an unauthorized revelation that Greenplum Chorus is built on CouchDB and Erlang.
- An impassioned defense of the integrity of Gartner’s analysis.
*At least in my case, that’s just a post title or snippet, plus a link back to the main post. The same goes for mapreduce.org, actually.
| Categories: Analytic technologies, Data warehousing, Greenplum, NoSQL | 2 Comments |
Story of an analytic DBMS evaluation
One of our readers was kind enough to walk me through his analytic DBMS evaluation process. The story is:
- The X Company (XCo) has a <1 TB database.
- 100s of XCo’s customers log in at once to run reports. 50-200 concurrent queries is a good target number.
- XCo had been “suffering” with Oracle and wanted to upgrade.
- XCo didn’t have a lot of money to spend. Netezza pulled out of the sales cycle early due to budget (and this was recently enough that Netezza Skimmer could have been bid).
- Greenplum didn’t offer any references that approached the desired number of concurrent users.
- Ultimately the evaluation came down to Vertica and ParAccel.
- Vertica won.
Notes on the Vertica vs. ParAccel selection include: Read more
| Categories: Analytic technologies, Benchmarks and POCs, Buying processes, Data warehousing, Greenplum, Netezza, Oracle, ParAccel, Vertica Systems | 7 Comments |
Greenplum Chorus and Greenplum 4.0
Greenplum is making two product announcements this morning. Greenplum 4.0 is a revision of the core Greenplum database technology. In addition, Greenplum is announcing Greenplum Chorus, which is the first product release instantiating last year’s EDC (Enterprise Data Cloud) vision statement and marketing campaign.
Greenplum 4.0 highlights and related observations include: Read more
Intelligent Enterprise’s Editors’/Editor’s Choice list for 2010
As he has before, Intelligent Enterprise Editor Doug Henschen
- Personally selected annual lists of 12 “Most influential” companies and 36 “Companies to watch” in analytics- and database-related sectors.
- Made it clear that these are his personal selections.
- Nonetheless has called it an Editors’ Choice list, rather than Editor’s Choice. 🙂
(Actually, he’s really called it an “award.”)
Comments on the Gartner 2009/2010 Data Warehouse Database Management System Magic Quadrant
February, 2011 edit: I’ve now commented on Gartner’s 2010 Data Warehouse Database Management System Magic Quadrant as well.
At intervals of a little over a year, Gartner Group publishes a Data Warehouse Database Management System Magic Quadrant. Gartner’s 2009 data warehouse DBMS Magic Quadrant — actually, January 2010 — is now out.* For many reasons, including those I noted in my comments on Gartner’s 2008 Data Warehouse DBMS Magic Quadrant, the Gartner quadrant pictures are a bad use of good research. Rather than rehash that this year, I’ll merely call out some points in the surrounding commentary that I find interesting or just plain strange. Read more
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)
| Categories: Analytic technologies, Data warehousing, EnterpriseDB and Postgres Plus, Greenplum, Infobright, Open source, PostgreSQL, Pricing, Scientific research | 14 Comments |
Greenplum customer notes
In a briefing about a forthcoming product announcement, Greenplum threw in a slide saying:
- Greenplum is getting 12-15 new (paying) customers per quarter, all of whom it fondly refers to as “Tier 1” enterprises.
- Greenplum will hit the 100+ customer mark this quarter (thus joining Vertica and Infobright).
- <10% of Greenplum business is now “influenced” by Sun hardware.
I asked Ben Werther to unpack that last claim for me. He quickly noted that it wasn’t his slide, but rather had been put together by colleagues. That said:
- As of the past quarter or two, <10% of Greenplum’s sales activity is on Sun, which works out to maybe one sale per quarter and at most a small number of sales cycles. (That’s down from from 50%+ not that long ago.)
- Most Greenplum business is now on HP or Dell equipment. Some is on IBM. There are some interesting sales cycles on Cisco’s new UCS (Unified Computing System) blades, but no closed deals yet. EMC seems to be part of the Cisco story.
No doubt part of the reason for the move away from Sun equipment is the impending Oracle acquisition. Another may be that the Greenplum/Sun appliance is somewhat underpowered. E.g., without particularly high levels of compression, eBay puts over 60 terabytes of data on each Greenplum node, which probably isn’t ideal from the standpoint of query performance.
Greenplum also says that 50% or so of sales are subscription-priced, rather than perpetual-licensed. I don’t have a sense for how long that’s been going on. (Edit: Ben Werther tells me this has been true for over a year.)
| Categories: Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, Greenplum, Market share and customer counts, Pricing | 2 Comments |
Three big myths about MapReduce
Once again, I find myself writing and talking a lot about MapReduce. But I suspect that MapReduce-related conversations would go better if we overcame three fairly common MapReduce myths:
- MapReduce is something very new
- MapReduce involves strict adherence to the Map-Reduce programming paradigm
- MapReduce is a single technology
| Categories: Analytic technologies, Aster Data, Cloudera, Data warehousing, Google, Greenplum, Hadoop, Log analysis, MapReduce, Michael Stonebraker, Parallelization, Web analytics | 11 Comments |
Greenplum is going hybrid columnar as well
Over the past summer, Vertica, VectorWise, and Oracle all announced flavors of hybrid row/columnar storage. Now it’s Greenplum’s turn. Greenplum is actually offering true columnar storage, as opposed to Oracle’s PAX-like scheme — and also as opposed to the kind of Frankencolumn storage Daniel Abadi decries. For example, you don’t have to do a join to retrieve multiple columns; you just ask for them and there they are. Similarly, Greenplum doesn’t maintain explicit row IDs – whether in row-oriented or column-oriented append-only storage – relying instead on block-level header information. Read more
| Categories: Analytic technologies, Columnar database management, Data warehousing, Database compression, Greenplum, Theory and architecture | 12 Comments |
My current customer list among the analytic DBMS specialists
(This is an updated version of an August, 2008 post.)
One of my favorite pages on the Monash Research website is the list of many current and a few notable past customers. (Another favorite page is the one for testimonials.) For a variety of reasons, I won’t undertake to be more precise about my current customer list than that. But I don’t think it would hurt anything to list the analytic/data warehouse DBMS/appliance specialists in the group. They are:
- Aster Data
- Greenplum
- Infobright
- Kickfire
- Kognitio
- Microsoft
- Netezza (my biggest client this year, probably, because of all the Enzee Universe appearances)
- Sybase
- Teradata
- Vertica
- Attivio, which may or may not be construed as being in the analytic DBMS business
- Clearpace, ditto
All of those are Monash Advantage members.
If you care about all this, you may also be interested in the rest of my standards and disclosures.