[3] In May 2024, Tanzu by Broadcom made the decision to close source the Greenplum Database project.

It was a merger of two smaller companies: Metapa (founded in August 2000 near Los Angeles)[4] and Didera in Fairfax, Virginia.

[9] Sun, which had also acquired MySQL AB, participated in a round of US$27 million investment in January 2009, led by Meritech Capital Partners.

[8] The Bizgres project included a few other members, and was supported through about 2008, when the product was just called "Greenplum" as well.

[10][11] The Sun Fire X4500 was a reference architecture and used by the majority of customers until a transition was made to Linux around that time.

[18] Pivotal's Greenplum database product uses massively parallel processing (MPP) techniques.

[20] Competitors include other MPP database management systems provided by major vendors such as Teradata, Amazon Redshift, Microsoft Azure, Alibaba AnalyticDB and, in the past, IBM Netezza.

[19][21] Additional competition comes from other smaller competitors, column-oriented databases such as HP Vertica, Exasol and data warehousing vendors with non MPP architecture, such as Oracle Exadata, IBM Db2 and SAP HANA.