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EMC released a free version of its data warehousing technology Feb. 1 with an eye toward developers and big data analytics.
The release of the Community Edition of the EMC Greenplum Database joins the Greenplum Data Computing Appliance in the tree of fruits from the company’s acquisition of Greenplum last July.
The freeware, which mixes Greenplum’s massively parallel processing (MPP) technology with analytic algorithms and data mining tools, is aimed specifically at developers and data scientists, according to EMC. It includes MADlib, an open-source analytic algorithms library designed to offer data-parallel implementations of mathematical, statistical and machine learning methods for structured and unstructured data, as well as Alpine Miner, a third-party analytics tool.
“We believe that it takes a community for the world to realize the extraordinary value that can come from Big Data, and no single company can do this alone,” said Scott Yara, vice president of EMC’s Data Computing Products Division. “A lot of people are getting started with data warehousing and analytics for the first time, so we want to give them the platform to get the work done. That started about a year and a half ago when we released the Greenplum Single Node Edition, which was really the first iteration of Community Edition. It has since had tens of thousands of downloads.”
When it acquired Greenplum, EMC said it was increasing its focus on big data. In the months since then, EMC’s Data Computing Products Division has doubled its workforce, Yara said.
“We think that our approach represents the new way, the net new opportunity in deeply analyzing big data,” he said. “We believe that our growing customer base is realizing that they need a new class of product outside the traditional EDW to realize greater value from their data, faster and to remain competitive.”
“Community Edition is about empowering developers, and because of our software heritage, no other company is better positioned to take the world of Big Data to the next level,” Yara added. “Our competitors who are hardware by nature aren’t doing this, and it would be difficult for them to embrace this in the full-hearted way we have.”