Officially Greenplum Database Single Node Edition (SNE) is only installable on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and SUSE Linux Enteprise Server (SLES), but while surfing the web I have seen many requests on how to install it on Debian/Ubuntu. Here I’m trying to give you some advices.
One of the main reasons users switch from other relational databases to PostgreSQL is the advanced support for geographic objects included in the PostGIS extension.
Being PostgreSQL specialists at 2ndQuadrant, we have tried to investigate if it was possible (and how) to install PostGIS on the Greenplum Single Node edition. Let's see how Marco Nenciarini, 2ndQuadrant consultant and a long time Debian developer, tried to do it.
I have been thinking for a while now about adding Greenplum support to an open-source application for web analytics that I wrote a few years ago, which is called ht://Miner and uses PostgreSQL.
In order to do this, I need a multi-CPU environment. While still waiting to get our new servers installed here in our data centre in Italy, I decided to look at Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) infrastructure. My intention is to do some benchmarking and spot the main differences in terms of performances between Greenplum Single Node Edition and PostgreSQL 8.4, my favourite DBMS.
If you wish to follow this article, you need to have an Amazon AWS account with a valid credit card. Do not worry, this test will only cost you a couple of dollars!
