EMC Is Buying Greenplum

I wish my clients would never buy each other, but it's inevitable.

I don't think anybody evaluating Greenplum should be much influenced by this deal one way or the other. (Whether they will be is of course a different matter.)

Greenplum Chorus could, in principle, work with non-Greenplum DBMS. That possibility suddenly looks a lot more realistic.

The list of analytic DBMS vendors with an appliance orientation is pretty impressive, including:

Greenplum is something of a specialist in large databases. EMC has to love that. Greenplum's weakness is concurrency. Greenplum's "polymorphic storage" is a good fit for a storage vendor with appliance-y ideas. And finally -- I think that even software-only analytic DBMS vendors should design their systems in an increasingly storage-aware manner, and have been advising my vendor clients of same. I'll blog that line of reasoning separately when I get a chance, and edit in a link here after I do. Related links:Here's the promised post as to why analytic DBMS need to be ever more storage-aware. Dave Kellogg crunched the EMC/Greenplum numbers, coming up with an estimated valuation range of $300-400 million, the high end of which is rumored to be correct. Merv Adrian suggests the big EMC/Greenplum loser is ParAccel, a viewpoint which presumably presupposes that the EMC/ParAccel partnership was significant in the first place. I talked with Ben Werther and posted more about Greenplum and EMC.I don't think adding a rich parent adds much of a reason to buy from Greenplum. But if you're the type who's nervous about smaller vendors -- well, Greenplum now isn't so small.