SAN MATEO, Calif., April 18, 2005 -- Greenplum today announced The Bizgres Project, a Greenplum-sponsored, community-supported open source project with the goal of building a complete database platform for business intelligence exclusively from free software.

The Bizgres Project aims to make the PostgreSQL object-relational database management system the open source standard for data warehousing and business intelligence. The project, located at www.bizgres.org, is open for general participation. It will be controlled and administered by its community of developers, who will include independent programmers and engineers from several companies.

"The goal of The Bizgres Project is to encourage a more focused development effort around making PostgreSQL a robust platform for business intelligence," said Luke Lonergan, CTO of Greenplum and technical lead on the project. "At Greenplum, we believe business intelligence is the 'killer application' for driving open source adoption within the enterprise. PostgreSQL is the world's most advanced open source database, and there is a tremendous opportunity to make it the de-facto open source option."

"Over the last two versions, PostgreSQL has become known as the leading open source database software for high-performance online transaction processing applications," said Josh Berkus, PostgreSQL Core Team member. "PostgreSQL's extensibility and advanced architecture make it a natural fit for the business intelligence/data warehousing market as well. I'm excited about working with Greenplum and other PostgreSQL contributors to realize this potential and capture another market."

Released last January, PostgreSQL 8.0 has rapidly expanded its user base and list of supported applications, due in part to the release of a native Windows version. PostgreSQL is the most full-featured and scalable of the open source enterprise database software available and includes advanced statistical functions and other tools. However, it lacks a few of the key high-end features found in a few proprietary databases, such as table partitioning and windowing functions. The Bizgres Project will address some of those features and help to widen the "comfort zone" of easy PostgreSQL scalability beyond the current 1/2 terabyte range.

The Bizgres Project will initially focus on the x86 family of architectures and the Linux and Solaris operating systems, with a Windows version for the first 1.0 release. Development on The Bizgres Project will include members of the Greenplum engineering team, as well as participation from other commercial entities and individual contributors.

About PostgreSQL

PostgreSQL is the collective work of hundreds of developers, building on almost 20 years of development, which started at the University of California at Berkeley. With its long-time support of an enterprise-level feature set including transactions, functions, triggers, and sub-queries, PostgreSQL is being used by many of today's most demanding businesses and government agencies. PostgreSQL is distributed under a BSD license, which allows use and distribution without fees for both commercial and non-commercial applications. To find out more about PostgreSQL or to download it, please visit the Postgresql.org home page at www.postgresql.org.

About Greenplum

Formed in 2003 from the merger of Metapa and Didera, Greenplum is an open source company dedicated to making enterprise data as available and easy to use for business users as Web data is for consumers. Greenplum's breakthrough database products bring the power of open source to enterprise business intelligence. Greenplum is headquartered in San Mateo, CA. For more information visit, www.greenplum.com

Breakaway Communications for Greenplum
Emily Swanson, 415-377-9766
eswanson@breakawaycom.com
or
PostgreSQL
Josh Berkus, 415-752-2500
press@postgresql.org