Greenplum 4.2 is out!

With an announce on the forum, Greenplum staff has spoke out about the new version of their Database Management System.
I can’t resist to blog about some of its new features.

## Cool new features
You can find a [detailed summary of the new features on Greenplum’s website](http://www.greenplum.com/community/forums/showthread.php?565-Announcing-Greenplum-Databse-4.2).
The first in the list is Greenplum **Database Extension Framework**.
You can think about it as a feature similar to Postgres 9.1 *EXTENSION* feature (even if there are no similarities in terms of implementation).
That is an amazing way to simplify extensions installing, uninstalling and upgrading.
I think that this feature will bring more _logic_ into the database.
Another interesting improvement is the **High-Performance gNet for Hadoop**.
Everybody knows *Hadoop*, and even if you don’t know it in details, you have at least heard about it.
With this feature, you can import/export data from/to hadoop clusters so fast, using the gNet protocol.
I advice you to try it, it is included in the Community Edition!
Helpers for **migrations** from other database systems.
Greenplum 4.2 offers some helpers to make a migration from other databases a lot easier.
For example, there are 20 Oracle functions that runs natively on Greenplum 4.2.
If you know Postgres, you could think about a sort of orafce.
That is a delicate field, I feel to advice you not to underrate the workload of a migration –
and do not think that everything can be made automatically.
**XML support**.
That’s fantastic. I am a Postgres user, administrator and consultant, and I really love Postgres XML support.
Now Greenplum has that feature. I am sure I will blog more about this in the future, with some practical usage.
Targeted **Performance Optimization**.
Greenplum 4.2 has some improvements regarding performance.
The 4.2 version is a lot smarter, it transparently eliminate irrelevant partitions in a table, producing that smaller amount of data needs to be scanned to obtain query results.
Another transparent operation is about memory: Greenplum 4.2 has a more efficent memory management, which results in a better memory utilization and higher concurrency.
In the next weeks I will try some of these features and blog about them, waiting for the Community Edition to be out!
So stay tuned with us on the Greenplum Community Forum and on 2ndQuadrant blog to get news about it.