Greenplum Debuts Open-Source Data Warehouse Software

Greenplum Corp., which aims to bring the benefits of open-source software to the business-intelligence area, this week launched the beta version of its DeepGreen open-source database for data warehousing. The company also revealed the Bizgres project to enhance the open-source PostgreSQL database, upon which DeepGreen is based, for business-intelligence applications.

With open-source software such as the Linux operating system and JBoss application server catching on, some see the business-intelligence market as fertile ground for open-source products. This week, startup JasperSoft Inc. debuted its JasperReports open-source report-writing software, along with its proprietary JasperDecisions report-aggregation portal software. And Business Objects SA, a leading developer of commercial business-intelligence tools, disclosed a deal with open-source database software vendor MySQL AB to embed MySQL into its BusinessObjects XI software.

The DeepGreen database, which uses the PostgreSQL open-source database at its core, is aimed at departmental business-intelligence applications and data marts involving up to 500 Gbytes of data. The beta version of DeepGreen is now available for free download under a BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution) license. DeepGreen runs on the Linux and Solaris Unix operating systems.

Greenplum is following a business model similar to that of Red Hat Inc., offering the software for free and selling services to support the product.

Greenplum is also developing DeepGreen MPP, a large-scale data warehouse system based on the DeepGreen software that can handle workloads involving multiple terabytes of data. Greenplum plans to sell DeepGreen MPP as a commercial product, competing against data warehousing technology vendors such as Netezza Corp. and NCR Corp.'s Teradata division when it's available later this summer.

Bizgres is a project to build a complete database system for business-intelligence and data warehousing tasks using the PostgreSQL open-source database. While Greenplum is sponsoring the effort, the company says the project will be controlled by the open-source community and not by Greenplaum or any one vendor.

Greenplum also said this week that former Exodus president and former Oracle executive Sam Mohamad joined the company as CEO.