I ought to think being in Enterprise Information management/Analytics profession as a consultant, you have to familiarize yourselves with plethora of tools across the following streams: Business Intelligence (IBM Cognos, SAP BO, MSTR, Qlikview etc), ETL (Infa, IBM's Data Stage etc) and Databases (Oracle, SQL Server, Sybase etc) and DB Appliances (GreenPlum, Netezza, Exadata, HANA etc)

Over the last few recent years, the hype and craving about Big-Data Analytics/Hadoop causes more confusions and tensions to keep abreast about latest technology and trends. This is because of the advancements and interesting use-cases about the Big-Data/Hadoop and the ways these technologies enhances the traditional Enterprise Datawarehousing/Business Analytics applications with crunched data/KPIs derived from unstructured and semi-structured data.

Above situations explains the craving in the professionals to learn and familiarize themselves with more and more technologies and tools. Because of one such craving, starting my journey to learn about "Pivotal Greenplum DB" - A shared Nothing, Massively Parallel Processing (MPP) DB Appliance. Fortunately the learning department in my Organization is conducting learning sessions on GreenPlum, which I have been utilizing from the beginning of this week.

Following link provides details about Key-Features, Architecture, Support for Hadoop, R, Java, Python etc. Backup and Restore, Interfaces and DB Applicance Management tools.
http://www.gopivotal.com/sites/default/files/Pivotal_Greenplum_DB_DS_05032013.pdf

Interesting features which I am planning to explore over the next few weeks :
gNet for Hadoop : A Connector for Hadoop environments which enables to exchange data between DB and Hadoop clusters, Provides Direct Query interoperability between Hadoop Nodes and GP DB nodes and supports Conversion of Custom format data (Pig, Hive etc) into GPDB format via apReduce which can be imported into GP.Programmable Analytics (Support for R) and Pivotal Extensions (support for Geo-Spatial, Python, Perl and Java functions)