Greenplum Database utilizes a shared-nothing, massively parallel processing (MPP) architecture that has been designed for business intelligence and analytical processing. Most of today’s general-purpose relational database management systems are designed for Online Transaction Processing (OLTP) applications. Since these systems are marketed as supporting data warehousing and business intelligence (BI) applications, their customers have inevitably inherited this less-than-optimal architecture. The reality is that BI and analytical workloads are fundamentally different from OLTP transaction workloads and therefore require a profoundly different architecture
