Pivotal’s Greenplum data warehouse software is now open source

Pivotal today released its Greenplum data warehouse software under an Apache 2 open-source license. The source code is available now on GitHub.

“The Greenplum Database (GPDB) is an advanced, fully featured, open source data warehouse. It provides powerful and rapid analytics on petabyte scale data volumes,” Pivotal wrote in the description of the Greenplum software on GitHub. “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 move comes eight months after Pivotal announced plans to do this.

Pivotal is a joint venture of EMC and VMware. Earlier this month, Dell said it plans to buy EMC, a part owner of VMware, for $67 billion.

EMC acquired Greenplum in 2010.

Teradata, which packages up software with dedicated hardware, has historically ruled the data warehousing business. IBM acquired Netezza shortly after EMC bought Greenplum. Cloud-based data warehouses are available from Amazon Web Services, IBM SoftLayer, Microsoft Azure, and, most recently, Oracle. Startup Snowflake also fields a cloud data warehouse.

Pivotal pushes the Cloud Foundry open-source platform-as-a-service cloud software. The company also sold a distribution of the Hadoop big data software but ultimately elected to open-source it earlier this year.