Libraries in Teradata Aster
I recently wrote (emphasis added):
My clients at Teradata Aster probably see things differently, but I don’t think their library of pre-built analytic packages has been a big success. The same goes for other analytic platform vendors who have done similar (generally lesser) things. I believe that this is because such limited libraries don’t do enough of what users want.
The bolded part has been, shall we say, confirmed. As Randy Lea tells it, Teradata Aster sales qualification includes the determination that at least one SQL-MR operator — be relevant to the use case. (“Operator” seems to be the word now, rather than “function”.) Randy agreed that some users prefer hand-coding, but believes a large majority would like to push work to data analysts/business analysts who might have strong SQL skills, but be less adept at general mathematical programming.
This phrasing will all be less accurate after the release of Aster 6, which extends Aster’s capabilities beyond the trinity of SQL, the SQL-MR library, and Aster-supported hand-coding.
Randy also said:
- A typical Teradata Aster production customer uses 8-12 of the prebuilt functions (but now they seem to be called operators).
- nPath is used in almost every Aster account. (And by now nPath has morphed into a family of about 5 different things.)
- The Aster collaborative filtering operator is used in almost every account.
- Ditto a/the text operator.
- Several business intelligence vendors are partnering for direct access to selected Teradata Aster operators — mentioned were Tableau, TIBCO Spotfire, and Alteryx.
- I don’t know whether this is on the strength of a specific operator or not, but Aster is used to help with predictive parts failure applications in multiple industries.
And Randy seemed to agree when I put words in his mouth to the effect that the prebuilt operators save users months of development time.
Meanwhile, Teradata Aster has started a whole new library for relationship analytics.
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