Greenplum

Analysis of data warehouse DBMS vendor Greenplum. Related subjects include:

October 19, 2009

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:

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:

For example, comparing PostgreSQL-based Greenplum with PostgreSQL itself, Greenplum offers:

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October 18, 2009

Greenplum customer notes

In a briefing about a forthcoming product announcement, Greenplum threw in a slide saying:

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:

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.)

October 18, 2009

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:

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October 14, 2009

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

June 25, 2009

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:

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.

June 9, 2009

Aster Data sticks by its SQL/MapReduce guns

Aster Data continues to think that MapReduce, integrated with SQL, is an important technology. For example:

I was a big fan of SQL/MapReduce when it was first announced last August. Notwithstanding persuasive examples favoring pure DBMS or pure MapReduce over DBMS/MapReduce integration, I continue to think the SQL/MapReduce idea has great potential.  But I do wish more successful production examples would become visible …

June 8, 2009

Per-terabyte pricing

Software-only DBMS vendors sometimes price per terabyte of user data.  Vertica’s list price is $100K/TB. Greenplum’s list price is $70K/TB. In practice, both offer substantial discounts, especially at higher volumes.  In both cases, this means raw data, uncompressed, without counting indexes or temp space.

Client experience teaches me that this definition is easy to forget, so let me reemphasize the key point:

Per-terabyte pricing is based on a calculated figure.  Per-terabyte pricing is not based on the current disk space used by your database when managed by the DBMS you are replacing.

There’s at least one important difference in how Vertica and Greenplum calculate database size.  No matter how many times you copy the data, Vertica only charges you for it once.* But if you spin out data marts and recopy data into it — as Greenplum rightly encourages you to do — Greenplum wants to be paid for each copy.  Similarly, Vertica charges only for deployment, and not for test or development; I didn’t remember to ask what Greenplum’s policies are in those regards. (Edit: Greenplum says in a comment below that it doesn’t charge for test or development data either.)

*That policy is a great fit with Vertica’s performance recommendation that you should store columns in different sort orders, perhaps an average of two copies per column.

June 8, 2009

Greenplum blogs about some customers

I’ve written some about Greenplum’s customers at eBay and Fox Interactive Media.  But as I recently grumped, I’m not in the mood right now to write much about other Greenplum customers.  Fortunately, Greenplum has filled the gap itself.  Marketing chief Paul Salazar just blogged about a number of other big Greenplum customers. And last month Paul blogged in considerable detail about what he characterizes as an enterprise data warehouse (EDW) conversion — Oracle replacement — at a large pharmaceutical company.

June 8, 2009

The future of data marts

Greenplum is announcing today a long-term vision, under the name Enterprise Data Cloud (EDC). Key observations around the concept — mixing mine and Greenplum’s together — include:

In essence, Greenplum is pitching the story:

When put that starkly, it’s overstated, not least because

Specialized Analytic DBMS != Data Warehouse Appliance

But basically it makes sense, for two main reasons:

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June 8, 2009

More on Fox Interactive Media’s use of Greenplum

Greenplum’s most important reference is probably its energetic advocate Fox Interactive Media, even ahead of much larger user Greenplum user eBay, and notwithstanding Aster Data’s large presence in Fox subsidiary MySpace. I just ran across a “review” of Greenplum by FIM’s Brian Dolan, neatly summarizing his views about Greenplum’s strengths, weaknesses, and uses inside Fox.  Highlights include: Read more

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