Intelligent Enterprise

Infobright, which offers an open-source database management system designed for data warehousing, has released its Community Edition for Microsoft Windows.

The latest release, which offers native support for Windows, is the result of requests from the Infobright open source user community.

"A large percent of visitors to Infobright.org are Windows users, and our goal is to support this segment of our community with a data warehouse that fits seamlessly into their infrastructures," Mark Windrim, VP of community relations at Infobright, said in a statement.

Infobright has made the new software available through its community Web site. Over the last four months, the company says it has seen nearly 4,000 downloads of the open source Community Edition

Infobright and other open-source vendors are responsible for something of a renaissance in database management for business intelligence, analytics and data warehousing. Infobright, Kickfire and others are focused mostly on the needs of MySQL shops.

In general, the open source style of marketing products and services is changing how nearly all vendors, not just open source companies, interact with customers and introduce new technology.

Infobright claims its columnar database is best-suited for analytics, and says its "self-managing Knowledge Grid" architecture can reduce typical implementation and management costs by up to 90%. The company's Community Edition supports up to 30 TB of data on a single, industry standard server. Integration with Sun Microsystems' MySQL database provides users of the open source database with a scalable analytic data warehouse.