Greenplum Database Architecture

Greenplum Database utilizes a shared-nothing MPP (massively parallel processing) architecture that has been designed from the ground up for BI and analytical processing using commodity hardware. In this architecture, data is automatically partitioned across multiple 'segment' servers, and each 'segment' owns and manages a distinct portion of the overall data. All communication is via a network interconnect -- there is no disk-level sharing or contention to be concerned with (i.e. it is a 'shared-nothing' architecture).

Most of today’s general-purpose relational database management systems (e.g. Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server) were originally designed for Online Transaction Processing (OLTP) applications. These databases utilize 'shared-disk' or 'shared-everything' architectures that are optimized for high transaction rates at the expense of individual query performance and parallelism.

Greenplum Database’s shared-nothing MPP architecture provides every segment with a dedicated, independent high-bandwidth channel to its disk. The segment servers are able to process every query in a fully parallel manner, use all disk connections simultaneously, and efficiently flow data between segments as query plans dictates. The degree of parallelism and overall scalability that this allows far exceeds general purpose database systems.

Greenplum Database's architecture is the results of many years of design and implementation by a team of some of the world's leading database and scalable systems experts.