Greenplum Announces Commercial Support for Bizgres

Latest Release Includes Enterprise Support; Makes PostgreSQL Viable Open Source Alternative to Proprietary Database Products for BI

Boston, LinuxWorld Conference and Expo, April 3, 2006

Greenplum, the leading provider of enterprise PostgreSQL for business intelligence (BI), today announced commercial support for the Bizgres open source database, beginning with the newly released version 0.9.

Bizgres 0.9 is the latest binary release of the open source Bizgres project, a thriving community focused on making PostgreSQL the best open source database for BI.  Bizgres 0.9 is free for evaluation, development and production deployments.

Commercial support for Bizgres is now available in two tiers. The Standard tier, which costs $1,995 per CPU per year, provides access to the latest software updates and patches, unlimited email and Web support and business-day telephone support. The Enterprise tier, at $4,995 per CPU per year, adds rapid response and 24/7 telephone support.

“This new release demonstrates how the Bizgres Project continues to be PostgreSQL’s intensive development lab for data warehousing and business intelligence features,” remarked Josh Berkus, PostgreSQL core team member and Bizgres contributor.  “On-disk bitmap indexes and faster external sorts should raise the ‘easy-to-manage’ size of PostgreSQL databases to near one terabyte.  Greenplum has provided the leadership and financial support to make these improvements possible.”

Launched in early 2005, the Bizgres community includes thousands of developers and organizations. This community is responsible for several of the key technical advancements incorporated into the latest release of PostgreSQL 8.1, including enhancements such as tripling sort performance and the first on-disk bitmap index for PostgreSQL.

Bizgres’ on-disk bitmap index is a first for open source databases.  The feature supports high-speed access to enormous data volumes with dramatically less storage space than traditional B-Tree indexes.  Performance tests of Bizgres 0.9 on typical BI workloads demonstrated a decrease in index size of more than 97 percent—from 1.8GB to 0.06GB.  Additionally, index creation time was cut by 84 percent—from 11 to two minutes, and query times decreased by 99 percent—from 6 minutes to less than 1 second.

“Support for Bizgres has been overwhelming since its launch last year.  This success has strengthened our commitment to link customers and the open source PostgreSQL project through our contributions to Bizgres,” said Luke Lonergan, CTO of Greenplum. “Bizgres 0.9 is the culmination of nine months of work on two critical facets of database performance: sorting and indexing.  With Bizgres 0.9, PostgreSQL is very competitive with proprietary database offerings.”

Bizgres support is now available through The Bizgres Network (http://bgn.greenplum.com), an integrated support platform that provides access to the latest Bizgres distributions, a comprehensive knowledge base and online technical support and services. Through the network, IT departments can download not only Bizgres 0.9, but also Greenplum’s high-end commercial offering, Bizgres MPP, and develop with it at no charge before putting their Bizgres MPP database into production.

About Greenplum
Headquartered in San Mateo, California, Greenplum is the leading provider of high-performance PostgreSQL for Business Intelligence. Greenplum’s Bizgres family of breakthrough database products is poised to revolutionize the way enterprises use BI to gain key competitive advantages in the marketplace, from departmental data marts to multi-terabyte data warehouses. The company sponsors The Bizgres Project, a community effort designed to make PostgreSQL the most robust open source database for data warehousing and BI. For more information about Greenplum, visit www.greenplum.com. For more information on the Bizgres Project, visit www.bizgres.org.