Data Warehousing with Greenplum, 2nd Edition

Chapter 2. What’s New in Greenplum?

Technology products evolve over time. Greenplum forked from the mainline branch of PostgreSQL at release 8.2.15, but continued to add new PostgreSQL features. PostgreSQL also evolved over time, and Pivotal began the process of reintegrating Greenplum into PostgreSQL with the goals of introducing the useful new features of later releases of PostgreSQL into Greenplum while also adding Greenplum-specific features into PostgreSQL.

This process began in release 5 of Greenplum in 2017 and continues with release 6 of Greenplum in 2019.

What’s New in Greenplum 5?

New in Greenplum Version 5

Following is a list of the new features in Greenplum 5. See later sections of the book for more details on some of these features.

PostgreSQL introduced a data file format change in release 8.4. Pivotal’s goal of rejoining the PostgreSQL code line is a gradual process. In Greenplum 5, we achieved parity with PostgreSQL 8.4. That meant a migration of the data files. There are too many new features in this release to list them all; here are a few important ones:

R and Python data science modules

These are collections of open source packages that data scientists find useful. They can be used in conjunction with the procedural languages for writing sophisticated analytic routines.

New datatypes

JSON, UUID, and improved XML support.

Enhanced query optimization

The GPORCA query optimizer has increased support for more complex queries.

PXF extension format for integrating ...