Greenplum, the grandest of the open source-based databases, whose massively parallel shared-nothing architecture supports petabyte data warehousing on cost-effective general-purpose hardware and promises linear scalability on thousands of processors, has pushed out its latest cut, rev 3.2, making it the first commercial database, the company says, to include MapReduce, the parallel computing technique pioneered by Goggle and copied by Yahoo’s Hadoop for analyzing the web.

The widgetry, in development for the last two, two-and-half years, gives Greenplum new capabilities for massive-scale data analytics and opens up its data to manipulation by folks with Perl and Python skills rather than just SQL, pushing it out to a wider population. Promising to capture all of enterprise’s data and make sense of it makes it a natural of the cloud.

Greenplum 3.2 also includes in-database compression that cuts the space needed to store data 3x-10x with a reported increase in I/O performance to match. And it adds programmable parallel analytics capabilities and enhanced graphical database monitoring.

Greenplum has a sales arrangement with Sun and currently finds that 60% of its 50-odd customers are running on Sun’s huge Thumper storage server on x86 Solaris as the Sun Data Warehouse Appliance.

One of those customers now happens to be Fox Interactive Media and its web properties – to wit MySpace – which are using Greenplum for purposes of targeted advertising and monetization.

The company, which doesn’t give its software away – think hybrid business model – says it’s currently growing revenues 2x quarter-over-quarter and has brought on new sales people to widen the momentum. It’s getting 40% of its business from South East Asia and India and is pushing into China and Japan.

Greenplum competes against the significantly pricier Teradata and Netezza. It says it can deliver a more power-efficient 100TB in two racks for $1.8 million compared to Teradata’s $20 million 20TB in eight racks and Netezza’s $7 million 70TB in six racks. It reportedly sees little of the like-minded Neoview on which HP is said to have spent hundreds of millions of dollars.

Greenplum’s customer base includes LinkedIn, the Nasdaq and Skype. It supports Dell, HP, IBM and EMC as well as BI tools like Pentaho, Informatica, Business Objects and Cognos.

• Petabyte-Scale Data Analytics Moving to the Cloud