Teradata’s nebulous cloud strategy
As the pun goes, Teradata’s cloud strategy is – well, it’s somewhat nebulous. More precisely, for the foreseeable future, Teradata’s cloud strategy is a collection of rather disjointed parts, including:
- What Teradata calls the Teradata Agile Analytics Cloud, which is a combination of previously existing technology plus one new portlet called the Teradata Elastic Mart(s) Builder. (Teradata’s Elastic Mart(s) Builder Viewpoint portlet is available for download from Teradata’s Developer Exchange.)
- Teradata Data Mover 2.0, coming “Soon”, which will ease copying (ETL without any significant “T”) from one Teradata system to another.
- Teradata Express DBMS crippleware (1 terabyte only, no production use), now available on Amazon EC2 and VMware. (I don’t see where this has much connection to the rest of Teradata’s cloud strategy, except insofar as it serves to fill out a slide.)
- Unannounced (and so far as I can tell largely undesigned) future products.
Teradata openly admits that its direction is heavily influenced by Oliver Ratzesberger at eBay. Like Teradata, Oliver and eBay favor virtual data marts over physical ones. That is, Oliver and eBay believe that the ideal scenario is that every piece of data is only stored once, in an integrated Teradata warehouse. But eBay believes and Teradata increasingly agrees that users need a great deal of control over their use of this data, including the ability to import additional data into private sandboxes, and join it to the warehouse data already there.
The Teradata Elastic Mart(s) Builder Viewpoint portlet automates the inclusion of outside data. If you’re already an authorized Teradata data warehouse user, you can fill in a very short form (three or so fields) and add authorization to import outside data, e.g. from a .CSV file. No fuss, little bother. Trivial as that sounds, when you combine it with Teradata’s pre-existing robust workload management tools, it creates a pretty good virtual data mart story.
Spinning out and maintaining consistency with physical data marts is a different matter. Teradata doesn’t seem too sure it believes in those. And while Teradata is obviously planning to increase its capability in that regard anyway, I didn’t get a lot of detail beyond the reference to Data Mover 2.0.
Related links
- My Greenplum-inspired post on the future of data marts, outlining issues in “private cloud” data warehousing.
- eBay’s “Analytics as a Service” pitch (about 1 ½ years old)
- A post by Teradata’s Dan Graham explaining the Teradata Agile Analytics Cloud and Elastic Mart(s) Builder Viewpoint portlet
- Home page and complete screen shot for the Teradata Elastic Mart(s) Builder Viewpoint portlet
Comments
5 Responses to “Teradata’s nebulous cloud strategy”
Leave a Reply
Curt – you have an important typo. Teradata express is limited to a rather lame 4GB, not ‘1 terabyte only’.
Not sure if that’s compressed or not, but this page
http://www.teradata.com/t/express-faq.aspx?id=6437
implies uncompressed.
My mistake … 4GB was for version 12.
That’s right. They’ve increased it to 1 TB.
Actually, I’m not sure whether that increase is only for the EC2 and/or VMware editions. But I don’t much care. 😉
The most realistic reason for “Teradata Express”, is so that you don’t have to have a bonafide Teradata platform to do development on… If you’re a consultant or developer, this is particularly important since you likely cannot afford even a single node, much less the data center environment required to run one. it’s simply an enabler, it has nothing to do with cloud, and it’s been out there for several major versions back to v2r5 if I remember right…
Fair enough. Free test/dev software is important. And the public cloud is used mainly for test/dev these days, at least by enterprises.
But it still contributes nothing to a cloud deployment strategy beyond a “get your feet wet” experimental experience (for vendor and user alike).