With the introduction of VMware Tanzu Data Intelligence, enterprises now have a unified, AI-ready data platform built on a modern lakehouse architecture that can seamlessly integrate diverse data types, accelerate analytics, and embed governance by design. As a key analytical engine within this architecture, VMware Tanzu Greenplum brings massively parallel processing and in-database machine learning to the heart of enterprise-scale data activation. Tanzu Greenplum powers the high-performance query, analytics, and model training capabilities that make Tanzu Data Intelligence a true foundation for modern, data-driven, and AI-enabled applications. The upcoming Tanzu Greenplum 7.6 will build on this role with significant updates designed to deliver even more speed, resilience, and flexibility.
The Tanzu Greenplum 7.6 release has been shaped by the needs of the modern analytics community. This release brings a game-changing capability: the Implied Index, also known as Ghost Index, for lightning-fast analytics on columnar tables. But that’s just the beginning. Tanzu Greenplum 7.6 will also unlock blazing-fast query performance and automated, seamless recovery from failures, giving your data platform the speed, resilience, and flexibility to drive modern analytics at scale.
Ghost Index support: Implied index on AO columnar tables
Achieve faster query performance on columnar tables without the overhead of traditional indexes. Tanzu Greenplum’s Append-Optimized (AO) Columnar Store is designed for efficient, high-speed analytics by eliminating the need for storage-intensive indexes and ongoing index maintenance.
Here’s how it works:
- Directly identifies matching rows from columnar data, minimizing unnecessary reads
- Materializes only the rows that satisfy query predicates, saving resources
- Combines bitmap filters across columns to handle multi-column conditions with ease
This index-free architecture is ideal for analytical workloads with selective WHERE clauses, delivering faster, more scalable performance while keeping operational complexity and storage costs low.
Performance improvements
Tanzu Greenplum 7.6 comes with a number of features and updates that can boost performance.
Accelerated performance with hardware-optimized CRC
Tanzu Greenplum 7.6 leverages vectorized AVX-512 carry-less multiplication instructions to accelerate CRC (cyclic redundancy check) computations—critical for operations like WAL read/write integrity and Append-Optimized (AO) table access. By leveraging high-performance AVX-512 instructions for checksum calculations, Tanzu Greenplum 7.6 can achieve over 50% faster CRC processing. This low-level optimization translates into real-world impact—SELECT workloads on wide tables have shown up to 40% improvement in query speed, enabling analytics to be significantly faster and more responsive at scale.
Optimizing joins on columns with many NULL values
Tanzu Greenplum 7.6 can deliver smarter query optimization with selective NULL-aware join filtering, powered by GPORCA. In scenarios where join keys contain many NULL values, unnecessary rows can bog down performance. Now, Greenplum can intelligently apply IS NOT NULL filters to eliminate rows that can’t possibly match—reducing costly joins and avoiding expensive data movement.
It is important to only add the IS NOT NULL predicate when it truly helps. To elucidate this point, consider the following SQL that identifies sales associates and their regions:
SELECT a.id, a.name, r.region_name
FROM associates a
INNER JOIN regions r ON a.region_code = r.region_code;
In this case, appending a.region_code IS NOT NULL is only helpful if there are a lot of associates with no assigned region. That’s where GPORCA shines: it applies this optimization only when it delivers measurable benefits, avoiding it in cases like outer joins or when NULL matches are valid.
The result? The potential for faster queries, fewer resources, and intelligent optimization that adapts to your data. That’s Greenplum 7.6.
Optimizing queries on tables distributed across heterogeneous segments
Greenplum 7.6 can makes scaling your data warehouse smarter with enhanced query optimization for non co-located tables, thanks to improvements in GPORCA. During cluster expansion, it’s common for some tables to reside on different segment subsets before redistribution is complete, leading to potential performance drops.
With this release, GPORCA automatically introduces the right data motion strategies to align table data on shared segments, enabling more efficient and consistent query execution even when distribution is temporarily unbalanced.
Whether you’re growing your cluster or managing dynamic workloads, Greenplum 7.6 enables smooth performance through every phase of scale-out.
Other GPORCA enhancements
In this release, teams will be able to unlock performance for even more complex workloads by enabling GPORCA for:
- LATERAL JOINs for more expressive and flexible query patterns
- Static and dynamic partition elimination across multi-level partitioned tables, speeding up scans by skipping irrelevant data
- Faster optimization paths for short-running queries, reducing planning overhead and accelerating time-to-insight
In summary, whether you’re running ad hoc queries or large-scale analytics, Tanzu Greenplum 7.6 delivers smarter, faster, and more efficient execution right out of the box.
Improved resilience
Greenplum cluster autorecovery
Tanzu Greenplum 7.6 revolutionizes cluster management with its all-new cluster autorecovery feature, designed to lighten the load on DBAs by automatically detecting and recovering failed segments. Running incremental recovery attempts at configurable intervals (like every minute), this capability enables your cluster to stay healthy and available with minimal manual intervention.
Built to be non-intrusive, autorecovery can avoid automatic segment rebalancing, so your workloads keep running smoothly. When rebalancing is needed, it can be manually triggered or targeted for specific segments, giving you full control.
Powered by the robust gpservice task framework, this feature lets you configure retry counts and timeouts to fit your environment’s needs, delivering flexible, seamless recovery that keeps your Greenplum cluster resilient and performant—automatically and effortlessly.
Improved differential recovery
Greenplum 7.6 can improve cluster resilience with dramatically faster differential recovery—outperforming full recovery in most cases. This is powered by key innovations including:
- Parallel rsync execution for blazing-fast data transfers
- The –inplace rsync option to slash disk I/O overhead
- Advanced batch-processed checksum verification for optimized integrity checks
Together, these enhancements can shrink recovery windows and maximize system availability, so your Greenplum cluster can bounce back quicker than ever, keeping your analytics running without missing a beat.
VMware Tanzu Greenplum 7.6 has been built keeping speed and resilience in mind. Experience quicker analytics on columnar tables with Ghost Index. Powered by an enhanced GPORCA optimizer, Greenplum 7.6 will deliver smarter, faster queries—even in the most complex scenarios—while intelligent cluster autorecovery and lightning-fast differential recovery enable your system to stay up and running with minimal effort.
Ready to accelerate your analytics, safeguard your data, and simplify operations? VMware Tanzu Greenplum is your trusted partner for powering next-generation, enterprise-scale insights—delivering unmatched performance and reliability every step of the way.
