Greenplum Adds Support for Google-pioneered MapReduce

Greenplum, a company that provides database software for data warehousing and analytics, now supports MapReduce, a parallel computing framework pioneered by Google (News - Alert).

 

MapReduce enables Google to process huge amounts of data and return results instantaneously. As data volumes explode and require the development of new computing paradigms, MapReduce is gaining momentum along with concepts like cloud computing and Hadoop (used by Yahoo!).

 

Greenplum MapReduce combines the benefits of the MapReduce model with the reliability and familiarity of the Greenplum relational database, providing the power of MapReduce to enterprises and enabling those companies to dramatically extend their current analytics capabilities.

 

Greenplum MapReduce allows customers to combine SQL queries and MapReduce programs into unified tasks that are executed in parallel across hundreds or thousands of cores.

 

“Greenplum gives enterprises the best of both worlds — MapReduce for programmers and SQL for DBAs — and will execute both MapReduce and SQL directly within Greenplum’s parallel dataflow engine, which is at the heart of the Greenplum Database,” the company said.

 

Some of Greenplum customers are involved in early-access program utilizing Greenplum MapReduce for advanced analytics. LinkedIn, which uses Greenplum Database for an innovative social networking features such as “People You May Know,” utilizes  Greenplum MapReduce as a way to develop compelling analytics products.

 

O’Reilly Media also has utilized the combined benefits of Greenplum and MapReduce. 

 

“Greenplum has seamlessly integrated MapReduce into its database, making it possible for us to access our massive dataset with standard SQL queries in combination with MapReduce programs,” said Roger Magoulas, research director, O’Reilly Media, in a statement. “We are finding this to be incredibly efficient because complex SQL queries can be expressed in a few lines of Perl or Python code.”

 

Scott Yara, co-founder and president of Greenplum, said, “The introduction of MapReduce into our product means that customers will immediately have a wide range of new capabilities for their massive-scale data analytics, something we are uniquely qualified to bring to market.”

 

“On its own, MapReduce is a powerful tool for data manipulation and analysis,” said Curt Monash, president of Monash Research and editor of the influential blog DBMS2, in a statement. “Companies that are integrating MapReduce and SQL are increasing its applicability and giving developers and DBAs the ability to work together on a common parallel data processing infrastructure.”