In a move that Pivotal says will make massively scalable, high-performance big data processing much more accessible, the company has turned its Greenplum data analytics platform into an open source product.

Greenplum is a massively parallel processing (MPP) database derived from PostgreSQL, a popular open source database. Unlike PostgreSQL and most other traditional databases, however, Greenplum supports high-speed SQL queries on very large data sets.

To put it in non-geek terms: Greenplum lets users analyze a lot of data, really fast. No other database that users can install on their own hardware, or provide as a service through the cloud, offers the same performance at scale.

Greenplum was a proprietary product, but as of Oct. 28, Pivotal is making it available it under the open source Apache 2.0 license. The change is the culmination of Pivotal's promise in February 2015 to open source its big data portfolio.

While the core Greenplum code is now open source, Pivotal will also offer a value-added version under a commercial license.

Probably the most significant impact of this change is that it makes it easy for cloud hosts to offer Greenplum-as-a-Service in the cloud. That will provide another highly scalable data analytics solution for users, which—in contrast to the major existing offerings for cloud-based, scalable data analytics—won't involve a proprietary solution.