VMware Tanzu Greenplum Room for Improvement

Jayanta Datta - PeerSpot reviewer
Executive Director at Morgan Stanley

I think the cloud version of VMware is still lacking significantly because we are using Snowflake or Redshift on the cloud. We have a lot of on-prem use cases and Greenplum is good for that but we also have a lot of cloud use cases and the solution is lacking in that sphere. A cloud-native version of Greenplum would simplify things by enabling the move from Greenplum to Greenplum. 

It would be helpful if they could include some inbuilt machine-learning functions for complex use cases. I'd also like to see some kind of integrated dashboarding within the product for visualization. For example, Power BI integration or Tableau integration so that we could create a quick dashboard without getting Power BI onboarded.

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MG
Director of IT Operations at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

They should improve product performance. It does not share resources well whenever it has more than one process running. If you have a user consuming a huge load size of resources, it takes down the entire system.

They should work on resource pulling and sharing those resources properly. At present, it allows one user to completely take over everything.

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Nasir Niamat - PeerSpot reviewer
Principal Software Engineer - Db Ops at i2c Inc.

Maintenance is time-consuming. It takes time to VACUUM and ANALYZE the tables to remove the fragmentations.

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Buyer's Guide
VMware Tanzu Greenplum
March 2024
Learn what your peers think about VMware Tanzu Greenplum. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: March 2024.
765,386 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Alvaro Fuentes - PeerSpot reviewer
Architect Projects at T-Systems International GmbH

I'd like to see more support for structured data and features related to queries on NoSQL keys, extra filters would be helpful. 

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BR
Data Engineer at Broadridge Financial Solutions

Scaling of the solution needs to be improved.

HD connection is available where as, not to any file system.

Connecting Greenplum with Gemfire(In-Memory) to load, sync, and reconcile data would be really valuable.

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GB
Senior Data Engineer at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

The initial setup is somewhat complex and the out-of-the-box configuration requires optimization.

- OS settings need to be tuned according to the Install guide.

- Only group/spread mirroring by gpinistsystem, block mirroring is manual (Best Practices Guide)

- Db maintenance scripts are not supplied - some of them added in cloud - need to be implemented based on the Admin Guide.

- Comes with two query optimizers, PQO is default, some queries perform better with the legacy planner, it needs to be set.

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AK
Consultant at a government with 10,001+ employees

Tanzu Greenplum's compression for GPText could be made more efficient.

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BR
Data Engineer at Broadridge Financial Solutions

I'd like so see better scaling, better performance from in-memory databases, and a higher compression rate. We have been facing some performance issue when doing batch loading with optimizer the scaling does works fine. They are working on having optimization techniques which made me write room for improvement.

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it_user373128 - PeerSpot reviewer
Data Architect & ETL Lead at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

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.

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it_user371898 - PeerSpot reviewer
Sr ETL Developer at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

It acts like a mainstream product not a novice any more. There are a lot of areas that can be improved. The bug fixes come as many patches like a start up instead of having scheduled release with proper improvements.

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it_user264192 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Enterprise Technical Architect at a computer software company with 10,001+ employees

We would like to see Greenplum maintain a closer relationship with and parity to features implemented in PostgreSQL. The current version of Greenplum is based on a fork of PostgreSQL v8.2.15. This edition of PostgreSQL was EOL by the PostgreSQL project on Dec 2011. The current version of PostgreSQL is v9.5.

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it_user1127370 - PeerSpot reviewer
Co-Founder, Chief of Operations with 10,001+ employees

The installation is difficult and should be made easier. Maybe if the process was simpler it would have a quicker adoption by other developers. This could also be accomplished by providing training aids, such as videos to help with installation or using certain features. There are resources currently available on their website, but you have to search through a lot of documentation.

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GM
Subdirector of Support for Production at a financial services firm with 51-200 employees

VMware Tanzu Greenplum needs improvement in the memory area and improved methods for quick access to the disc. So, one of the quick goals of Greenplum must work on enhancing access to the disc by adding hints in the database.

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it_user488589 - PeerSpot reviewer
Technology Architect at Broadridge Financial Solutions

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.

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it_user555939 - PeerSpot reviewer
Information Architecture Specialist (TOGAF Certified) at a comms service provider

The implementation of an upgrade takes a long time. But maybe it's different from one instance to another, I'm not sure.

Also, one of the disadvantages, not a disadvantage with the product itself, but overall, is the expertise in the marketplace. It's not easy to find a Greenplum administrator in the market, compared to other products such as Oracle. We used to work with such products, but for Greenplum, it's not easy to find resources with the knowledge of administration of the database.

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it_user369321 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Director & Global Lead, Big Data Center of Excellence at a pharma/biotech company with 10,001+ employees

The Greenplum appliance itself has had some reliability issues, so it would be great if that could be improved in the next version. More critical, though, is that the latest devices are not backward compatible. i.e., We have to replace our entire environment to upgrade. That’s quite an expense. I would hope they could improve the upgrade roadmap in the future.

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it_user374715 - PeerSpot reviewer
BI Data Engineer at a tech vendor with 51-200 employees
  • 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.
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it_user371805 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Business Intelligence Developer at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees

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.

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it_user422625 - PeerSpot reviewer
Technical Lead at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees

EMC already developed DCA V3, But if the hardware is little stable, I prefer DCA V2.

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it_user145740 - PeerSpot reviewer
Consultant at a financial services firm with 5,001-10,000 employees

We found some issues with larger tables that have daily data appended, where after a while this seems to create lag in the query speed. This might just have to do with local knowledge rather than the product itself.

We have a table which is currently contains 27.6m rows and has a daily delta added to it of roughly 16.5k rows per day. While this isn’t particularly large, we have noticed the table begins to perform poorly when queried, in spite of having set up a VACUUM process to be performed weekly. It may be that the VACUUM process needs to be performed more frequently (like daily), but we’ve not yet found the optimal way of maintaining this particular table.

It’s worth saying that this is one table out of over 400 perfectly well performant tables and views in the same database. Hope that helps,

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it_user371457 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Consultant at a retailer with 10,001+ employees

The performance needs to be improved.

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it_user203334 - PeerSpot reviewer
Technical Lead with 1,001-5,000 employees

More stability in terms of query result.

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it_user372360 - PeerSpot reviewer
Sr. Software Engineer at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

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.

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it_user372336 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Technical Engineer at a tech company with 1,001-5,000 employees

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.

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RA
Site Manager at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

The deployment process for this solution could be made easier.

I saw some limitation with respect to the column store, and removing this would be an improvement.

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it_user776835 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Data Warehouse Developer at a comms service provider with 51-200 employees

It will be very useful if we could communicate with other database types from Greenplum (using a database link).

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it_user371766 - PeerSpot reviewer
Sr. Data Operation Engineer at a marketing services firm with 501-1,000 employees
  • Better integration with big data tech stack
  • Scalability: for example, system schema (pg_catalog) is one bottleneck for scalability
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it_user1256802 - PeerSpot reviewer
Consultant/Architect with 51-200 employees

I'd like to see a bridge between Greenplum and Hadoop.

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CZ
Solutions Engineer at VST-ECS Philippines Inc.

As of now, I honestly don't see any room for improvement. I am very happy with this solution, It's helped me a lot.

They should add more analytics. Their documentation could also be improved so that I don't have to bother my coworkers and tech support so often. 

They should advertise more and make it easier for consumers to leave feedback. That way, customers could read the reviews and decide if it's the right solution for them and their needs.

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it_user374739 - PeerSpot reviewer
Data Warehouse Specialist at a comms service provider with 1,001-5,000 employees

It doesn't work as efficiently as we'd like because it requires more segment node capacity (size, RAM, CPU) than we currently have.

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it_user371724 - PeerSpot reviewer
DB Manager at a marketing services firm with 501-1,000 employees

It should support more feature that do exist on Postgres – like JSON datatype.

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it_user259983 - PeerSpot reviewer
Lead Consultant with 501-1,000 employees

Session management for client tools needs work.

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DO
President of the Board at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

Some integration with other platforms like design tools, and ETL development tools, that will enable some advanced functionality (like fully down processing, etc.) would be helpful in future releases. Also, if the solution could offer automated creation of DDL statements from power designers, for example, it would be very useful. 

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Buyer's Guide
VMware Tanzu Greenplum
March 2024
Learn what your peers think about VMware Tanzu Greenplum. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: March 2024.
765,386 professionals have used our research since 2012.