EMC launches free edition of Greenplum database

EMC on Tuesday rolled out an open source community edition of its Greenplum data warehousing software. The free version is aimed at bringing more developers into the data warehousing fold.

Scott Yara, vice president of EMC's data computing products division, said the community edition of the Greenplum database could turn "10s of thousands of downloads" into "100,000s of thousands." "There's an opportunity here to grow the analytics community," said Yara.

The game plan for EMC is pretty obvious: Put Greenplum software in as many hands as possible. If Greenplum can build a vibrant data warehousing app ecosystem it could become a standard platform. Yara added that Greenplum has historically focused on high-end data warehousing, but the community of developers needs to be larger and should reach out to data scientists and other IT pros.

The community edition of Greenplum's database includes:

• Greenplum Database CE, software for large scale analytics.
• MADlib, an open source analytic algorithms library.
• Alpine Miner, a visual data mining modeler.
• The community addition can be downloaded as a pre-configured VMWare appliance to be used on laptops and desktops, or as a set of packages for other machines.

Greenplum previously had a free "single node edition" of its database, but the more full-featured addition could reach a wider audience. Yara said a lot of developers are just getting started on data warehousing.

"Being a default platform requires a lot of things, but the biggest is to make it easy to get the software in the hands of developers," said Yara.

Related:

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• EMC's launches Greenplum appliance
• Cloudera, EMC Greenplum form data warehousing alliance
• EMC to acquire Greenplum for data warehousing, analytics