Who's behind LucidDB? LucidDB is the result of an ongoing effort by a number of different organizations and individuals. It was started as a collaboration between LucidEra, Inc. (a software startup) and The Eigenbase Project (a non-profit organization). Much of the technology was adapted from an earlier venture (Broadbase Software, which produced the industry's first turn-key data mart product). LucidEra acquired the rights to this codebase, integrated it into the pluggable DBMS framework provided by Eigenbase, and contributed the result (LucidDB) back to Eigenbase as open-source software under the terms of the GPL. LucidEra went out of business in June 2009, but Eigenbase sponsorship for the community effort continues, providing project hosting resources such as source control and release management; Eigenbase also oversees coordination with related projects. Most recently, a new company called Dynamo BI has picked up the baton and is commercializing the technology under the name DynamoDB; read the announcement on the mailing list.

Is paid support or commercial (non-GPL) licensing available for LucidDB? Volunteer support is available through the users mailing list. Paid support is available from DynamoBI. Non-GPL licensing is of LucidDB is available from DynamoBI. For further questions about Eigenbase licensing, contact info@eigenbase.org. For further information on commercial licensing contact DynamoBI.

Why not just use an existing open-source database such as MySQL? Other open-source databases are great for transaction processing, but very limited when it comes to advanced business intelligence requirements. LucidDB is purpose-built for flexible, high-performance analytics, including integrated ETL and OLAP capabilities, with very little administration required.

How can I become a contributor? There are many ways to contribute, including code, documentation, testing, integration with other projects, and evangelism. If you like to hack, you can start with using LucidDB's extensibility features to create useful components such as user-defined function libraries and data source connectivity plugins, and then move on into deeper parts of the system if that's where your interests lie. Before committer privileges can be granted to the source control system, a standard contributor agreement is required by The Eigenbase Project.