VMware Tanzu Data Solutions Reviews and Pricing

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

Jan 20, 2016

It only takes minutes to process millions of record. The bug fixes come as many patches like a start up instead of having scheduled release with proper improvements.

What is most valuable?

Parallel processing
Takes minutes to process millions of records

How has it helped my organization?

This has improved our daily load process reducing the run time at least by three to four hours which made other departments within the organization to look for data from the Enterprise Data Warehouse.

What needs improvement?

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.

For how long have I used the solution?

I've used it for five years.

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What was my experience with deployment of the solution?

It took a while to fully take advantage of this as we had to come up with lots proprietary solutions when linking to other products.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

There is no issue with its stability.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

There is no issue scaling it.

How are customer service and support?

8/10 we had a technician come out on a new year in 2012 to fix some hardware failure.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

We were one of pioneers in adopting this solution. So we got the best deal when compared to the competitors in several areas.

How was the initial setup?

The initial move was a bulk transfer from the old system to new Greenplum based solutions. It was all done by Greenplum contractors. But to get it working with other products was challenging.

What about the implementation team?

Greenplum employees developed and supported the initial move. Later they became remote consultants with support through phone and in-person as needed.

What was our ROI?

They gave a really good deal and we have been with them for five years even though the product got bought over by couple of different companies.

What other advice do I have?

You need strong DBAs and architects to support the initial transfer.

Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.

it_user371766

Sr. Data Operation Engineer at a marketing services firm with 501-1,000 employees

Jan 18, 2016

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MPP architecture is important to process data in such volume. Better integration with big data tech stack is needed.

What is most valuable?

MPP (Massive Parallel Processing); processing large amount of data.

How has it helped my organization?

We process billions of rows of data every hour; MPP architecture is important to process data in such volume.

What needs improvement?

Better integration with big data tech stack
Scalability: for example, system schema (pg_catalog) is one bottleneck for scalability

For how long have I used the solution?

I've used it for four to five years.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

The system has some bottleneck, like system schema; some commands (batch loading) is bottlenecked by master DB architecture

How are customer service and technical support?

Customer Service:

It's very poor.

Technical Support:

It's very poor.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

Used Greenplum originally. We have evaluated other products; the final decision is based on ROI

How was the initial setup?

Products was installed by vendor; all ETL scripts and schema are designed and implemented in-house.

What about the implementation team?

The product was installed by vendor; all ETL scripts and schema are designed and implemented in-house.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

Greenplum has an open source version now.

What other advice do I have?

Scalability is one major concern; once data reach certain level; the performance is dropped and much more issues will be triggered, like disk error; out of memory; etc. Be sure that you proper scope your need (including growth) before the decision of system and its size.

Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.

Buyer's Guide

VMware Tanzu Data Solutions

June 2025

Free Report: VMware Tanzu Data Solutions Reviews and More

Learn what your peers think about VMware Tanzu Data Solutions. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: June 2025.

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860,592 professionals have used our research since 2012.

it_user371724

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

Jan 18, 2016

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The reports are running very fast, a matter of minutes instead of hours as it was previously.

What is most valuable?

The MPP – fast aggregation and that I still reuse the PL/SQL code.

How has it helped my organization?

The reports are running very fast, a matter of minutes instead of hours as it was previously.

What needs improvement?

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

For how long have I used the solution?

I've used it for three years.

What was my experience with deployment of the solution?

Not more than any new DB – not something particular.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

Not more than any new DB – not something particular.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

Not more than any new DB – not something particular.

How are customer service and technical support?

Customer Service:

It's good.

Technical Support:

It's good.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

I used Oracle Enterprise edition – moving to Greenplum due to the MPP (it’s like Map-Reduce). I prefer a SQL solution rather Hadoop or whatever – especially if you’re moving from RDBMS. Now I’m also using Amazon Redshift from the same reason and also we don’t need to manage any server, it’s only a service and this is our best option especially because we’re already using Amazon.

How was the initial setup?

It's straightforward.

What about the implementation team?

In-house.

What other advice do I have?

Read the documentation and always perform tests.

Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.

it_user371457

IT Consultant at a retailer with 10,001+ employees

Jan 18, 2016

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There are many valuable features, such as parallel loading and the solution's scalability.

What is most valuable?

There are many valuable features, such as parallel loading and the solution's scalability.

How has it helped my organization?

It's allowed us to do a lot of data analytics with it that we weren't able to do before.

What needs improvement?

The performance needs to be improved.

For how long have I used the solution?

As a whole, two years on multiple versions.

What was my experience with deployment of the solution?

We've had no issues with deployment.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

It's stable, but slowness is an issue.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

It's scaled find for us.

How are customer service and technical support?

Customer Service:

Customer service is OK.

Technical Support:

Technical support is OK.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

No solution was used previously.

What about the implementation team?

Implementation was done by a vendor team.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

Pricing is pretty much OK compared to others.

Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.

it_user369321

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

Jan 13, 2016

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The loading and transformation of large data sets is valuable.

Valuable Features:

Processing speed – especially loading and transformation of large data sets.

Improvements to My Organization:

Before we implemented Greenplum, our weekly data loads (for third party marketing data sets) were taking over three days. (We also had some monthly data that could take up to 3 days to load and transform via Informatica.) After we implemented Greenplum, the loads were reduced to less than nine hours. Previously, we were receiving data early Wed a.m. and not getting out to the salesforce (if we were lucky) until noon on the following Monday. Now we get the data to the field early Friday mornings before they wake up.

Room for Improvement:

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.

Implementation Team:

We have used EMC Consulting for some projects, and we have lots of EMC storage.

Other Advice:

If you can, do a benchmark with other MPP options including cloud alternatives. Although our Greenplum implementation was very successful (going on 4 years ago), I wish we had benchmarked against Teradata and Netezza (now IBM) at least. Today, I would consider not even buying hardware… just doing it all in the cloud.

Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.

it_user259983

Lead Consultant with 501-1,000 employees

Jun 30, 2015

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Session management needs improvement, but performs well with larger data volumes because it uses massively parallel processing.

What is most valuable?

The performance is the most valuable.

How has it helped my organization?

There is only a fraction of performance tuning that you need to be careful about, compared to Oracle DB.

What needs improvement?

Session management for client tools needs work.

For how long have I used the solution?

I've used it for nine months.

How are customer service and technical support?

Customer Service:

Nothing to complain about.

Technical Support:

Nothing to complain about.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

Previously, there was Oracle database, and the EMC Greenplum database was used for better performance from larger data volumes because it uses massively parallel processing. This increased the performances multiple times while reducing time needed for optimization of database queries.

What about the implementation team?

We had a team from EMC, who had a very high level of expertise.

What other advice do I have?

It's a very good product for reducing the time and man power needed for database optimization for datawarehousing purposes.

Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.

it_user203334

Technical Lead with 1,001-5,000 employees

Feb 15, 2015

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Needs more stability in terms of query results but we have improved our query response time.

What is most valuable?

External tables to load the data from flat files.

How has it helped my organization?

It helped us in loading millions of data in quick time & improved query response.

What needs improvement?

More stability in terms of query result.

For how long have I used the solution?

Five years - DCA V2.0 EMC & Greenplum Database

What was my experience with deployment of the solution?

No.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

Not usually, but sometimes we do.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

No issues encountered.

How are customer service and technical support?

Customer Service:

Excellent.

Technical Support:

Excellent.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

We applied MPP Appliance for the first time earlier we were running on SMP’s.

How was the initial setup?

It was straightforward.

What about the implementation team?

Vendor- they had good expertise.

What was our ROI?

Good.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

We also looked at Teradata.

What other advice do I have?

Very good and cost effective with very good customer support.

Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.

it_user76890

Engineer at a marketing services firm with 51-200 employees

Dec 26, 2013

We use Greenplum for production but not for development and testing because it consumes too much resources

We use the scrum methodology to manage our engineering work. And while this does give us the flexibility to quickly respond to changing business needs, it also means that our databases’ schemas are not set in stone. To accomodate frequent changes to the way we structure our data, we’ve adapted Ruby on Rails database migrations for use beyond our Rails apps.

Our first challenge was to find and extract the migration’s functionality from Rails so that we could use it without needing to bring in the other features of Rails we didn’t need. Thankfully, this turned out to be relatively simple because almost all of the functionality can already be accessed by Rake tasks, so it was just a matter of building a Rake file that contains the tasks we wanted from Rails. The only thing we had to add to get started was a Rake task for creating new migrations, since Rails creates them either automatically when creating new model objects or through the `rails generate migration` command.

We quickly ran into problems, though, because we use Greenplum, a DBMS built on Postgres that adds support for features that help accomodate big data. Unlike standard Postgres, Greenplum adds features, such as table partitions, not found in most DBMSes, but Rails is designed to be DBMS agnostic so you can easily switch between, say, Postgres and MySQL and SQLite without any more trouble than changing a single configuration file. So we decided to cut around Rails’s database abstractions and instead directly write SQL in our migrations and dump SQL structure files rather than Rails schema files.

Only this didn’t work because, to complicate matters further, although we use Greenplum in production and staging environments, for local testing and development we use Postgres because Greenplum has minimum requirements that ended up consuming too much of our workstations’ resources. So we ultimately ended up developing a hybrid solution that allows us to support Greenplum and Postgres in the same migrations.

The two main aspects of the solution are selective application of options when making changes to the database and keeping two separate dumps of the database, one for Greenplum with Greemplum-only syntax and one for Postgres with Greenplum-only syntax removed. For example, we rewrote the Rails `create_table` migration function to add support for Greenplum options like partitions, data distribution, and append-only tables, but then have the function ignore those options when running the migrations against our development Postgres databases. This allows us to use a single set of migrations on all of our databases, drastically simplifying what could have otherwise been a gnarly challenge.

By no means is our solution complete or perfect. It only supports those features of Greenplum that we use, and new features only get added in as we need them, plus there is some risk associated with keeping two separate schema dumps and the potential for them to get out-of-sync. Still, compared to maintaining a database with frequently changing schemas without the aid migrations, it’s lightyears better.

Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.