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:

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:

In addition, I see free Greenplum as a charity offering that could be appealing to scientists who face PostgreSQL performance limitations.

Related links

Comments

14 Responses to “Greenplum Single-Node Edition — sometimes free is a real cool price”

  1. Guillaume Theoret on October 19th, 2009 10:38 am

    Wow, that’s very interesting. I’m definitely going to give this a test run to see how it matches up against LucidDB.

  2. Jerome Pineau on October 19th, 2009 11:31 am

    I think InfoBright’s ICE version (if I recall the name correctly, the freebie version) is not really an option without any DML right?

  3. Bob Zurek on October 19th, 2009 3:04 pm

    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/

  4. Todd Fin on October 19th, 2009 8:12 pm

    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?

  5. Ben Werther on October 20th, 2009 12:44 am

    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.

  6. keru on October 20th, 2009 4:10 am

    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 🙂

  7. Ruhal on October 20th, 2009 3:38 pm

    Unlike infobright there is a large user community providing production like scripts for Greenplum at http://www.gpdba.com.

  8. Paul Johnson on October 20th, 2009 5:51 pm

    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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