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Astor Data, Greenplum and GridSQL all allow Massive Parallel Processing of SQL queries. They are also all built around PostgreSQL technology. Is this just because of licensing issues or are there other reasons? To me, it seems like the MyISAM, not being ACID complient and therefore not running into the same issues with MVCC (like seen here) as PostgreSQL is far better suited for building high-performance data warehouses. After all OLAP load does not require transactions as far as I can see.

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It is mostly a license issue. These developments end up patching the code quite heavily, so if you were to deal with MySQL, you'd either have to open-source your code or be at the mercy of MySQL's corporate owner for the life of your business. Some offers for MySQL get around that by implementing their work as a storage engine, but that doesn't offer all the flexibility that they need, and they invariably end up patching the MySQL core as well.

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Not true. You only have to give away the source if you distribute a GPL app as far as I know. If you use it internally, you can keep you changes to yourself. That is why Stallman says SaaS is an end run around the GPL. – Gaius Feb 7 '11 at 5:49
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Gaius: What's your point? The MPP solutions discussed here sell proprietary software that is derived from open-source software. They don't sell their software as a service. – Peter Eisentraut Feb 7 '11 at 7:32
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I can see two reasons:

1) historically, PostgreSQL had better query planner and statistics analyzer. This might be not true now, but few years ago PostgreSQL was much better then MySQL on complex queries, which is OLAP ones.

2) PostgreSQL have better functions/triggers/etc programming support.

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I think it still does. though I can't speak at all for mysql 5.5 – xenoterracide Feb 6 '11 at 21:43
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Well, most of the time, these commercial forks develop their own planner and optimizer to accommodate the distributed or parallel nature of what they are doing. – Peter Eisentraut Feb 7 '11 at 0:21
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