I recently attended PGconf in Vienna, Austria, where we announced the open-sourcing of Pivotal Greenplum, which has become the first open source massively parallel (MPP) data warehouse, and is simply called Greenplum Database. It was very interesting to see the positive reactions of the Postgres-specific crowd at this event and witness their excitement to take the product for a spin.
Of course with this announcement, anyone can clone the github repo and build the product, but there is another segment of the community that just wants to try out the functionality of the product without going through that process. For that group, we now have the Pivotal Greenplum Sandbox Virtual Machine. It combines the open source Greenplum Database, the commercially available Pivotal Greenplum Command Center management tool, Apache MADlib (incubating), PostGIS, PL/R, PL/Perl, and PL/Java into an easy-to-use virtual machine which runs in either VirtualBox or VMware Fusion. Free to try for as long as you like, the sandbox showcases the sheer power of the open source MPP data warehouse while also demonstrating how Pivotal Greenplum can easily address day-to-day tasks performed in typical data warehousing and business intelligence environments.
In addition to the virtual machines, we have provided the Greenplum Database Sandbox Tutorial to familiarize users with the basic functionality of the database. The tutorial is designed to be a growing list of lessons that will be built out over time, but the initial set will give you multiple ways to get started:
- Create Users and Roles
- Create and Prepare Database
- Create Tables
- Data Loading
- Queries and Performance Tuning
- Introduction to Greenplum In-Database Analytics
The Greenplum Database Sandbox is available now to download and try free of charge from the Pivotal Network. There are specific downloads for VMware Fusion or VirtualBox to ease the setup process.
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