The Greenplum Database (GPDB) is an advanced, fully featured, open source data warehouse. It provides powerful and rapid analytics on petabyte scale data volumes. Uniquely geared toward big data analytics, Greenplum Database is powered by the world’s most advanced cost-based query optimizer delivering high analytical query performance on large data volumes.

The Greenplum project is released under the Apache 2 license. We want to thank all our current community contributors and are really interested in all new potential contributions. For the Greenplum Database community no contribution is too small, we encourage all types of contributions.

Overview

A Greenplum cluster consists of a master server, and multiple segment servers. All user data resides in the segments, the master contains only metadata. The master server, and all the segments, share the same schema.

Users always connect to the master server, which divides up the query into fragments that are executed in the segments, sends the fragments to the segments, and collects the results.

Requirements

• From the GPDB doc set, review Configuring Your Systems and Installing Greenplum and perform appropriate updates to your system for GPDB use.

• gpMgmt utilities - command line tools for managing the cluster.

  You will need to add the following Python modules (2.7 & 2.6 are supported) into your installation

  • psi
  • lockfile
  • paramiko
  • setuptools
  • epydoc

Code layout

The directory layout of the repository follows the same general layout as upstream PostgreSQL. There are changes compared to PostgreSQL throughout the codebase, but a few larger additions worth noting:

• gpMgmt/

  Contains Greenplum-specific command-line tools for managing the cluster. Scripts like gpinit, gpstart, gpstop live here. They are mostly written in Python.

• gpAux/

  Contains Greenplum-specific extensions such as gpfdist and gpmapreduce. Some additional directories are submodules and will be made available over time.

• doc/

  In PostgreSQL, the user manual lives here. In Greenplum, the user manual is distributed separately (see http://gpdb.docs.pivotal.io), and only the reference pages used to build man pages are here.

• src/backend/cdb/

  Contains larger Greenplum-specific backend modules. For example, communication between segments, turning plans into parallelizable plans, mirroring, distributed transaction and snapshot management, etc. cdb stands for Cluster Database - it was a workname used in the early days. That name is no longer used, but the cdb prefix remains.

• src/backend/gpopt/

  Contains the so-called translator library, for using the ORCA optimizer with Greenplum. The translator library is written in C++ code, and contains glue code for translating plans and queries between the DXL format used by ORCA, and the PostgreSQL internal representation. This goes unused, unless building with --enable-orca.

• src/backend/gp_libpq_fe/

  A slightly modified copy of libpq. The master node uses this to connect to segments, and to send fragments of a query plan to segments for execution. It is linked directly into the backend, it is not a shared library like libpq.

• src/backend/fts/

  FTS is a process that runs in the master node, and periodically polls the segments to maintain the status of each segment.

Regression tests

• The default regression tests

make installcheck-good

• optional extra/heavier regression tests

make installcheck-bugbuster

• The PostgreSQL check target does not work. Setting up a Greenplum cluster is more complicated than a single-node PostgreSQL installation, and no-one's done the work to have make check create a cluster. Create a cluster manually or use gpAux/gpdemo/ (example below) and run make installcheck-good against that. Patches are welcome!

• The PostgreSQL installcheck target does not work either, because some tests are known to fail with Greenplum. The installcheck-good schedule excludes those tests.

Basic GPDB source configuration, compilation, gpdemo cluster creation and test execution example

• Configure build environment

configure --prefix=<install location>

• Compilation and install

make
make install

• Bring in greenplum environment into your running shell

source <install location>/greenplum_path.sh

• Start demo cluster (gpdemo-env.sh is created which contain PGPORT and MASTER_DATA_DIRECTORY values)

cd gpAux/gpdemo
make cluster
source gpdemo-env.sh

• Run tests

make installcheck-good

Glossary

• QD

  Query Dispatcher. A synonym for the master server.

• QE

  Query Executor. A synonym for a segment server.

Documentation

For Greenplum Database documentation, please check online docs: http://gpdb.docs.pivotal.io