Greenplum Launches the Bizgres Network, Makes Commercial Open-Source Data Warehouse Products, Services and Support Available at the Click of a Button.

SAN MATEO, Calif. -- O'Reilly Media Invests in Innovation with Its Purchase of Bizgres MPP: Industry's First Downloadable, Enterprise-Class PostgreSQL for Business Intelligence

Greenplum today unveiled The Bizgres Network (http://bgn.greenplum.com), a customer web portal that makes it easy for companies to download, deploy, and access support for Greenplum's Bizgres MPP for their mission critical Business Intelligence (BI) applications. Bizgres MPP is the only enterprise-class distribution of PostgreSQL to combine parallel processing with fault tolerance in a shared-nothing architecture optimized for BI.

The Bizgres Network (BGN) is an integrated support platform that provides access to Bizgres MPP software, a comprehensive knowledge base, and online technical support and other services. Through the network, IT departments can download Bizgres MPP and develop with it at no charge before putting their database into production. A more cost-effective option than traditional data warehousing solutions, Bizgres MPP also enables companies to scale their systems incrementally, and buy-as-they-grow.

Multi-terabyte data warehousing has traditionally required "rocket scientists" armed with specialized computers. Today, The Bizgres Network makes high-end data warehousing and BI immediately accessible to companies of all sizes, with enterprise grade support through e-mail and telephone.

Bizgres MPP is the first commercial open source database that enables organizations to easily deploy terabyte-scale BI systems on clusters of low-cost commodity servers from any hardware vendor, such as Dell, HP, Sun or Rackable. With The Bizgres Network, Greenplum also announced the release of version 2.1 of Bizgres MPP, a significant product upgrade. Enhanced functionality incorporates the most requested features from users and provides improvements in query support, performance, reliability, and ease-of-use. Key new features in version 2.1 include:

--PostgreSQL 8.1 compatibility - now faster and better concurrency with the latest release of PostgreSQL

--Improved Transaction Throughput - supports mixed light OLTP and DSS workloads more effectively, with hundreds of statements per second of throughput

--Optimized for the latest Intel/AMD CPUs - all CPUs work together to answer each query, even on single hosts

--Improved Fault-Tolerance and Back-Up and Restore utilities

"Open source is thriving because it's filling a role that older proprietary technologies can't because of their high costs and slow performance. This success is enabling the next wave of open source to become as much about innovation as commoditization," said Scott Yara, CEO and president, Greenplum. "With the Bizgres Network, Greenplum is pioneering this trend by providing software that allows companies to quickly deploy terabyte-scale BI systems on off-the-shelf, commodity hardware - an unprecedented combination. Because Bizgres MPP drastically reduces the barriers to deploying large, high-performance warehouses, companies can begin to use BI across more levels of the organization, and in more ways."

"O'Reilly has been a strong advocate and user of open source technology and commodity hardware for BI and Data Warehousing to make sophisticated data analysis affordable and an important strategic asset to the company," said Roger Magoulas, director of research at O'Reilly Media. "Bizgres MPP's great performance and ability to scale to large data volumes is impressive and necessary as we acquire and analyze large and growing data sets. With Bizgres MPP, processes that used to take 10 hours now run in less than seven minutes. We are excited to use Bizgres MPP to improve our analytic productivity and continue to stay on top of the latest technology trends."

Bizgres MPP further benefits from the strengths of PostgreSQL, which has been in development for over two decades and enjoys strong community and industry support. In addition, the Bizgres Project (www.bizgres.org) is a Greenplum-sponsored and community-supported open source project that aims to make the PostgreSQL database management system the open source standard for data warehousing and BI. Bizgres.org has become a strong community where advanced BI and data warehousing features can be conceived, developed, and tested. Since April 2005, Bizgres.org has been responsible for several key features that have been since included in the core PostgreSQL distribution, including table partitioning, and improved copy performance.

Greenplum is partnering with iSmart Panache, a Santa Clara based global services company, to provide technical support through the Bizgres Network. iSmart is providing support professionals with deep experience in database technology and data warehousing to customers of Bizgres and Bizgres MPP.

To download Bizgres MPP, and to visit The Bizgres Network, visit http://bgn.greenplum.com.

About Greenplum

Headquartered in San Mateo, California, Greenplum is re-defining the business intelligence industry through its high-performance, low cost data warehousing solutions that utilize open source software and commodity, off-the-shelf hardware. 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.