Alibaba Cloud MaxCompute vs Greenplum Database

Alibaba Cloud MaxCompute is a web-accessible, cloud-deployed data platform with separate storage and compute. It supports data lakes, streaming ingestion, and in-database machine learning. Standard computing resources cost $22 a month on subscription, with a minimum purchase of 50 CUs. Multi-zone HA computing resources cost $28.60 a month on subscription and provide high-availability compute across multiple availability zones. For elastic capacity, Elastically reserved CUs are listed at $0.05 a month, billed hourly, with scheduled scaling and pay-as-you-go billing. Auto-elastic CUs are listed at $0.06 a month, billed hourly, with usage monitored per second, automatic scaling, and charges based on resources consumed. The pricing model is paid, with a starting pricing note of $0.05. These options separate fixed subscription capacity from elastic resource usage, while the platform’s storage and compute separation supports data workloads that need independently provisioned resources.

Greenplum Database is a PostgreSQL-based, open-source data warehouse for analytics, machine learning, and AI. Its architecture spreads data and query work across a cluster: a coordinator divides queries among segment servers. The project describes it for large analytical warehouses and business intelligence, including petabyte-scale data. Query planning can use GPORCA alongside the PostgreSQL-based planner. Storage options include append-optimized row and column formats, with compression for column storage. PXF connectors connect to Hadoop, object stores including Azure, Google Cloud Storage, MinIO, and S3, and SQL databases through JDBC. External tables can be queried or used to load outside data; PXF also supports querying Apache Iceberg foreign tables. Clients can connect through psql, ODBC, or JDBC. Greenplum is available as a free open-source project under Apache 2, while the commercial VMware Tanzu Greenplum offering is priced on request. It supports on-premises deployment and data lakes. Documented access control covers object privileges; row-level and column-level access controls are not supported.