Data Warehousing with Greenplum

Foreword

In the mid-1980s, the phrase “data warehouse” was not in use. The concept of collecting data from disparate sources, finding a historical record, and then integrating it all into one repository was barely technically possible. The biggest relational databases in the world did not exceed 50 GB in size. The microprocessor revolution was just getting underway, and two companies stood out: Tandem, who lashed together microprocessors and distributed Online Transaction Processing (OLTP) across the cluster; and Teradata, who clustered microprocessors and distributed data to solve the big data problem. Teradata named the company from the concept of a terabyte of data—1,000 GB—an unimaginable amount of data at the time.

Until the early 2000s Teradata owned the big data space, offering its software on a cluster of proprietary servers that scaled beyond its original 1 TB target. The database market seemed set and stagnant with Teradata at the high end; Oracle and Microsoft’s SQL Server product in the OLTP space; and others working to hold on to their diminishing share.

But in 1999, a new competitor, soon to be renamed Netezza, entered the market with a new proprietary hardware design and a new indexing technology, and began to take market share from Teradata.

By 2005, other competitors, encouraged by Netezza’s success, entered the market. Two of these entrants are noteworthy. In 2003, Greenplum entered the market with a product based on PostgreSQL, that utilized the larger memory ...