Append Only tables, data compression and bulk load and extraction using External Tables are very valuable features for us.
Technology Architect at Broadridge Financial Solutions
Valuable features for us: Append Only tables, data compression and bulk load and extraction using External Tables.
What is most valuable?
How has it helped my organization?
We have improved our quarterly statements turnaround dramatically and could sustain for increasing data.
What needs improvement?
With the ORCA optimizer the earlier Append-Only feature has been upgraded to Append-Optimized where now we can update the data on earlier Append-Only tables just like any other heap tables. But I found this has increased the time taken for Vacuum Analyze operation on these tables like from 10 mins to 1 hr + (on large tables). In our case we don't need an update on our Append Only tables and hence this became a drawback. VA on Append-Optimized tables need to be improved.
Backup & Restore performance need to be improved.
ORCA optimizer when turned on is not showing consistency. Some workloads shows improved performance and some workloads became very slow. This need to be improved for consistency.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have used it for about 4 years now.
Buyer's Guide
VMware Tanzu Data Solutions
May 2025

Learn what your peers think about VMware Tanzu Data Solutions. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: May 2025.
856,873 professionals have used our research since 2012.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
Pre ORCA version was stable. ORCA release is not stable. Some workloads slowed down with new release even when the new optimizer is not turned ON.
How are customer service and support?
Tech support is average. They lack information about new features in the new releases and the possible impact of them.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
Earlier we were using OLTP based RDBMS solution. We realized we needed a OLAP solution and also something that can scale horizontally.
Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.

Senior Business Intelligence Developer at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees
With this solution, we've reduced load on the OLTP systems.
Valuable Features
The most valuable feature of Greenplum is the Massively Parallel Processing (MPP).
Improvements to My Organization
With this solution, we've reduced load on the OLTP systems.
Room for Improvement
The fact GreenPlum is using an older version of Postgres means developers coming from other products will find many missing features in PostgreSQL, features which you would assume are standard.
Greenplum is based on Postgres 8.2.15 which was released in 2009. While the SQL syntax and functionality has continued to evolve in other platforms in the ensuing years it appears to have stagnated in Greenplum.
Deployment Issues
We haven't had any issues with deployment.
Stability Issues
It's been stable for us.
Scalability Issues
It's scaled for our needs.
Customer Service and Technical Support
The community around GreenPlum is very small, making it difficult to learn from others experience via forums or blog posts.
Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.
Buyer's Guide
VMware Tanzu Data Solutions
May 2025

Learn what your peers think about VMware Tanzu Data Solutions. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: May 2025.
856,873 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Technical Lead at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Installation is very simple, make sure to set the configuration values based on the requirement.
What is most valuable?
We can integrate the Hadoop with DCA V2. This will be huge development in the big data technologies.
How has it helped my organization?
It increased the read/write process because of it MPP architecture.
What needs improvement?
EMC already developed DCA V3, But if the hardware is little stable, I prefer DCA V2.
For how long have I used the solution?
I am from a support background, and have used this on multiple accounts, for the last four years.
What was my experience with deployment of the solution?
There have been no issues with the deployment.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
Hardware failure is a concern.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
We have had no issues scaling it for our needs.
How are customer service and technical support?
Technical support is excellent.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
I know many customers are migrating from Oracle to Greenplum due to its faster processing.
How was the initial setup?
It is straightforward,open source system.
What about the implementation team?
Better chose EMC to perform the implementation. More over, it is not complex and we can do it easily in our environment with a little knowledge.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
Greenplum is an opensource system, but they do charge for support.
What other advice do I have?
Installation is very simple, make sure to set the configuration values based on the requirement.
Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.
Data Warehouse Specialist at a comms service provider with 1,001-5,000 employees
The most valuable features are MPP and that it's polymorphic. It doesn't work as efficiently as we'd like because it requires more segment node capacity than we currently have.
What is most valuable?
The most valuable features are MPP and that it's polymorphic.
How has it helped my organization?
We have a set of workflow flows that takes 10 hours in Oracle Exadata, now it takes 4 hours with EMC Greenplum.
What needs improvement?
It doesn't work as efficiently as we'd like because it requires more segment node capacity (size, RAM, CPU) than we currently have.
For how long have I used the solution?
I've used it since 2013.
What was my experience with deployment of the solution?
At the moment, we don't have any issues with deployment.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
At the moment, we don't have any issues with stability.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
At the moment, we don't have any issues with scalability.
How are customer service and technical support?
Customer Service:
8/10
Technical Support:8/10
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
Yes, we have Oracle Exadata.
How was the initial setup?
The initial setup is straightforward. It was simple for our personnel to install on the Unix system and network.
What about the implementation team?
What was our ROI?
It's a good product when comparing the price to its functionalities.
What other advice do I have?
You should consider the capacity of your data before you buy it.
Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.
BI Data Engineer at a tech vendor with 51-200 employees
It has HA built-in with mirroring and many other tuning features that make it highly configurable.
What is most valuable?
- Parallel Processing and Data Distribution based architecture.
- HA built-in with mirroring.
- Highly configurable and lots of tuning features.
How has it helped my organization?
- This has helped us bring down our end-to-end EDW load time to 1/3 the time.
- It has enabled faster and efficient data analysis.
- Scalable environment without adding too much cost.
What needs improvement?
- It needs a much more robust and user friendly monitoring and management front-end tool.
- More stability and auto-recovery with the segments.
- Report generations on system health and recommendations.
For how long have I used the solution?
I've used it for two years.
What was my experience with deployment of the solution?
Up to now, we've had no issues with deployment.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
Up to now, we've had no issues with stability.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
Up to now, we've had no issues with scalability.
How are customer service and technical support?
The response is fairly good but would like more support from the R&D on more complex issues. Also, they need to ensure there are logs that can be used without causing any downtimes to the system for any case analysis.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
It's a highly efficient and faster DB with lot of features at much less cost to that of other MPP DB’s evaluated.
How was the initial setup?
It was complex as we have to code convert everything into GP functions so as to best be able to use the GP parallel. Pushdown feature was not available via Informatica. The initial parameter setup took quite some time to test to get the sweet spot for performance.
What about the implementation team?
In-house with vendor support.
What other advice do I have?
Make sure you have the designs, approaches and architecture in place before kicking of the implementation. Its best to have someone involved with prior migration experience.
Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.
Data Architect & ETL Lead at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees
Processing speed of queries used for ‘Reporting’ solutions is the most valuable feature.
Valuable Features:
Processing speed of queries used for ‘Reporting’ solutions is the most valuable feature.
Improvements to My Organization:
Not Applicable for the area I was responsible for, as we ended up migrating away from Greenplum.
Room for Improvement:
Stability and scalability for large number of concurrent applications & their users. The results we got were very inconsistent, depending on number of connections taken up by multiple applications and users.
When our application was first deployed using Greenplum, the number of users of the rrack on which Greenplum was deployed was very limited. We got excellent query performance results at that time. But as more applications started getting deployed, we started getting very inconsistent performance results. Sometimes the queries would run in sub-seconds, and sometimes same queries would run 10 times longer. The reason we found this was that Greenplum limits the number of active concurrent connections. Once all connections are being used, any new query gets queued, and thus response time suffers.
The impression we got was that the EMC Sales team that sold Greenplum to the organization did a great job. But later on the ball was dropped when it came to educating on which type of applications are suitable to Greenplum , and how to configure it to get optimal performance. When Pivotal took over support of Greenplum, their consultant visited us to go over the issues we were having. He advised us that Greenplum is not the best environment for our application needs. We ended up migrating our application out of Greenplum, along with a few other applications.
Deployment Issues:
There was no issue with the deployment.
Stability Issues:
There were issues with the stability.
Scalability Issues:
There were issues with the scalability.
Other Advice:
Ensure that this is the right tool for your needs. For instance, Greenplum is not the best tool for cases where data has to be kept up to date in real time. Capacity planning is key to success, once you do decide it is the right tool for you.
Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.
Sr. Software Engineer at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees
It provides file loaders to reduce dependency on Informatica.
Valuable Features
- Distributed data for performance
- File loaders to reduce dependency on Informatica
Improvements to My Organization
Batch processing times have dramatically decreased from over 12 hours to under three hours. Much of this is converting off of Informatica and using distributed processing. Reporting performance also improved greatly.
Room for Improvement
Since we are upgrading to a new version at this time, it’s hard to say. But we seem to be replacing a disk on the appliance every week.
Use of Solution
I've used it for six years.
Deployment Issues
There's no issues, although we are currently in the middle of an upgrade to v4.3.5.
Stability Issues
It seems like we are replacing a disk on the appliance every week. Not a noticeable issue for users and batch processing is not adversely impacted.
Customer Service and Technical Support
Very good. Response times are good for service calls.
Initial Setup
I believe the set-up was straightforward. I don’t remember any issues.
Implementation Team
We used a vendor team. My advice is that the planning is critical. When converting processing jobs, convert them to PostgreSQL for better performance. Yes they could work as written previously, but you benefit using the features of the product immediately if you adjust the processing to match appliance. Use the bulk processing to your advantage.
Other Solutions Considered
We evaluated other solutions. Not sure of the reasons why this product was chosen.
Other Advice
It’s a good product. We moved from Oracle and I don’t want to go back.
Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.
Senior Technical Engineer at a tech company with 1,001-5,000 employees
The loaders – their methods, insert, update and merge – were most valuable.
What is most valuable?
The Greenplum loaders – their methods, insert, update and merge – were most valuable. The external table feature within Greenplum was also very valuable in achieving performance and scalability
How has it helped my organization?
A lot of customers use Greenplum and for their ETL use cases they use Informatica PWX for Greenplum, which helps them achieve transfer of data from a number of data sources into Greenplum. We can help customers to load data effortlessly and quickly.
What needs improvement?
It would be best if Greenplum would support array writes through ODBC drivers . Currently through Data Direct Greenplum drivers we can have single row inserts into Greenplum only. It would help if array loading is supported.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using Greenplum loaders to load data into GreenPlum for three years.
What was my experience with deployment of the solution?
There were no issues in deploying it.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
The external table feature helps to make this a stable solution.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
It scales to our and our customers needs as required.
How are customer service and technical support?
The ongoing response from their support on certain technical issues has been slow. It would help if we can have a faster turn-around here.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
There was no other solution used previously.
How was the initial setup?
The installation and configuration is straightforward.
What about the implementation team?
We implemented through a in-house team . The overall solution will be useful and is not complex
What other advice do I have?
If the use case is going to be requiring a huge data transfer and big data analytics. This is a good product to use.
Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.

Buyer's Guide
Download our free VMware Tanzu Data Solutions Report and get advice and tips from experienced pros
sharing their opinions.
Updated: May 2025
Product Categories
Data Warehouse Database Development and Management Relational Databases Tools Message Queue (MQ) SoftwarePopular Comparisons
MuleSoft Anypoint Platform
Oracle Exadata
Red Hat AMQ
PubSub+ Platform
SAP BW4HANA
Apache Hadoop
IBM Netezza Performance Server
Oracle Database Appliance
Quest Foglight for Databases
Buyer's Guide
Download our free VMware Tanzu Data Solutions Report and get advice and tips from experienced pros
sharing their opinions.
Quick Links
Learn More: Questions:
- Looking for advice on how to migrate from Oracle Exadata to VMware Tanzu Greenplum
- What is the biggest difference between ActiveMQ and RabbitMQ?
- What is the biggest difference between IBM MQ and RabbitMQ?
- How does IBM MQ compare with VMware RabbitMQ?
- Oracle Exadata vs. HPE Vertica vs. EMC GreenPlum vs. IBM Netezza
- When evaluating Data Warehouse solutions, what aspect do you think is the most important to look for?
- At what point does a business typically invest in building a data warehouse?
- Is a data warehouse the best option to consolidate data into one location?
- What are the main differences between Data Lake and Data Warehouse?
- Infobright vs. Exadata vs. Teradata vs. SQL Server Data Warehouse- which is most compatible with front end tools?