Bizgres 0.7 Released

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Bizgres 0.7 Available: Enhancements to PostgreSQL Strengthens BI Capabilities
Performance, Ease of Use, and New Features Establish Bizgres as the Most Advanced Open Source Alternative to Proprietary Databases for BI

Portland, OR – OSCON 2005 – August 3, 2005 – The Bizgres Project (www.bizgres.org), a Greenplum-sponsored, community-supported, open source project with the goal of building a complete platform for Business Intelligence (BI) exclusively from free software, announced today new open source upgrades to the PostgreSQL source code with the release of Bizgres 0.7.

Greenplum and its partners founded the Bizgres project to actively contribute to PostgreSQL and to develop new open source tools for Business Intelligence users.  This latest version of Bizgres provides features critical to supporting analytical and reporting applications widely in production use.  Bizgres 0.7 establishes PostgreSQL as the most advanced open source database for BI and data warehousing.

“Bizgres 0.7 is a significant leap forward in terms of making PostgreSQL more usable for BI and data warehousing, and several of its features have been submitted for inclusion in the upcoming 8.1 release of PostgreSQL,” said Josh Berkus, PostgreSQL core team member.  “Greenplum’s strong commitment to open-sourcing its enhancements is commendable, and advances the competitive status of PostgreSQL and other open source enterprise software.”

The newest Bizgres delivers enhancements in 3 areas: performance, ease-of-use and reporting tools.

Performance: Bizgres 0.7 enhances query performance with the addition of table partitioning and bitmapscan. Developed by PostgreSQL contributor Simon Riggs, table partitioning significantly improves query performance against large tables by enabling the optimizer to avoid scanning particular table segments for certain queries. Bizgres 0.7 also integrates the in-memory bitmap index work done by PostgreSQL steering committee member, Tom Lane, which improves query performance by allowing different index structures to be used in a single query request.  Another update increases loading speed from 30%-90% for both CSV and text formats.  These enhancements in Bizgres are integrated with the primary development of PostgreSQL, ensuring continued innovation and support.

Ease of Use: Bizgres 0.7 includes a commercial-grade installer from InstallAnywhere, which delivers a streamlined, user-friendly, and multi-platform consistent setup for all components.  This will make it easier for those new to open source enterprise software to get started testing and using Bizgres.

New Features: JasperReports and KETL, the extract, transform and load (ETL) technology from Kinetic Networks are now integrated with Bizgres.  Developers can now access a tightly integrated, end-to-end software stack capable of supporting all aspects of enterprise-class BI reporting. JasperSoft, Kinetic Networks and Greenplum have jointly developed a clickstream reporting application to showcase the capabilities of the new platform and provide a base from which developers can get started on new applications. The new application, Bizgres Clickstream, automates the process of processing log files, populating the warehouse, and producing out of the box reports on web site activity and usage.

“In the 3 months since its launch, Bizgres has burgeoned into an incredibly successful open source project. Bizgres 0.7 is representative of that momentum, demonstrating Greenplum’s commitment to working closely with the community to deliver significant performance, ease-of-use, and feature enhancements,” said Sam Mohamad, CEO of Greenplum.  “At Greenplum, we believe that the open-source development model provides the strongest value to our customers, and we look forward to continuing our work with the community to further establish PostgreSQL as the best open source database for BI.”

The Bizgres Project is initially focused on x86 architectures and the Linux and Solaris operating systems, with a Windows version upcoming. Development on The Bizgres Project includes members of the Greenplum engineering team and its partners, and participation from other commercial entities and individual contributors.

Greenplum, the project’s sponsor, will base its upcoming Bizgres MPP Edition (formerly called DeepGreen MPP Edition) software on Bizgres, extending the database engine from 500GB to hundreds of Terabytes of data handling capability using Massively Parallel Processing technology.

About PostgreSQL
PostgreSQL is the collective work of hundreds of developers, building on almost 20 years of development, which started at the University of California at Berkeley. With its long-time support of an enterprise-level feature set including transactions, functions, triggers, and sub-queries, PostgreSQL is being used by many of today’s most demanding businesses and government agencies. PostgreSQL is distributed under a BSD license, which allows use and distribution without fees for both commercial and non-commercial applications.  To find out more about PostgreSQL or to download it, please visit the Postgresql.org home page at www.postgresql.org.

About Greenplum
Headquartered in San Mateo, California, Greenplum is the first company to offer an open source, enterprise-class database for business intelligence to companies of all sizes.  The company sponsors The Bizgres Project, a community effort designed to make PostgreSQL the most robust open source database for data warehousing and business intelligence.  Greenplum will be releasing a massively parallel version of Bizgres later this year that will support multi-terabyte data volumes at a fraction of the cost traditional data warehouse solutions. The latest version of Bizgres is available for download from www.greenplum.com. For more information about The Bizgres Project, visit www.bizgres.org.