Teradata
Analysis of data warehousing giant Teradata. Related subjects include:
The Teradata Accelerate program
An article in Intelligent Enterprise clued me in that Teradata has announced the Teradata Accelerate program. A little poking around revealed a press release in which — lo and behold — I am quoted,* to wit:
“The Teradata Accelerate program is a great idea. There’s no safer choice than Teradata technology plus Teradata consulting, bundled in a fixed-cost offering,” said Curt Monash, president of Monash Research. “The Teradata Purpose Built Platform Family members are optimized for a broad range of business intelligence and analytic uses.”
| Categories: Data warehousing, Pricing, Teradata | Leave a Comment |
High-performance analytics
For the past few months, I’ve collected a lot of data points to the effect that high-performance analytics – i.e., beyond straightforward query — is becoming increasingly important. And I’ve written about some of them at length. For example:
- MapReduce – controversial or in some cases even disappointing though it may be – has a lot of use cases.
- It’s early days, but Netezza and Teradata (and others) are beefing up their geospatial analytic capabilities.
- Memory-centric analytics is in the spotlight.
Ack. I can’t decide whether “analytics” should be a singular or plural noun. Thoughts?
Another area that’s come up which I haven‘t blogged about so much is data mining in the database. Data mining accounts for a large part of data warehouse use. The traditional way to do data mining is to extract data from the database and dump it into SAS. But there are problems with this scenario, including: Read more
| Categories: Aster Data, Data warehousing, EAI, EII, ETL, ELT, ETLT, Greenplum, MapReduce, Netezza, Oracle, Parallelization, SAS Institute, Teradata | 6 Comments |
Carson Schmidt of Teradata on SSDs
Carson Schmidt is, in essence, Teradata’s VP of product development for everything other than applications and database software. For example, he oversees Teradata’s hardware, storage, and switching technology. So when Teradata Chief Development Officer Scott Gnau didn’t have answers at his fingertips to some questions about SSDs (Solid-State Drives), he bucked me over to Carson. A very interesting discussion about SSDs (and other subjects) ensued.
Highlights included: Read more
| Categories: Data warehousing, Solid-state memory, Storage, Teradata | 1 Comment |
How to tell Teradata’s product lines apart
Once Netezza hit the market, Teradata had a classic “disruptive” price problem – it offered a high end product, at a high price, sporting lots of features that not all customers needed or were willing to pay for. Teradata has at times slashed prices in competitive situations, but there are obvious risks to that, especially when a customer already has a number of other Teradata systems for which it paid closer to full price.
This year, Teradata has introduced a range of products that flesh out its competitive lineup. There now are three mainstream Teradata offerings, plus two with more specialized applicability. Teradata no longer has to sell Cadillacs to customers on Corolla budgets.
But how do we tell the five Teradata product lines apart? The names are confusing, both in their hardware-vendor product numbers and their data-warehousing-dogma product names, especially since in real life Teradata products’ capabilities overlap. Indeed, Teradata executives freely admit that the Teradata Data Mart Appliance 551 can run smaller data warehouses, while the Teradata Data Warehouse Appliance 2550 is positioned in large part at what Teradata quite reasonably calls data marts.
When one looks past the difficulties of naming, Teradata’s product lineup begins to make more sense. Let’s start by considering the three main Teradata products. Read more
| Categories: Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, Netezza, Pricing, Teradata | 14 Comments |
Teradata’s Petabyte Power Players
As previously hinted, Teradata has now announced 4 of the 5 members of its “Petabyte Power Players” club. These are enterprises with 1+ petabyte of data on Teradata equipment. As is commonly the case when Teradata discusses such figures, there’s some confusion as to how they’re actually counting. But as best I can tell, Teradata is counting: Read more
| Categories: Data warehousing, eBay, Market share and customer counts, Petabyte-scale data management, Specific users, Teradata | 11 Comments |
Teradata Virtual Storage
One of the big features of Teradata 13.0, announced this week (Edit: and to be shipped some time in 2009), is Teradata Virtual Storage, which sounds pretty cool. So far as I can tell, Teradata Virtual Storage has two major aspects, namely: Read more
| Categories: Data warehousing, Solid-state memory, Storage, Teradata | 3 Comments |
Teradata Geospatial, and datatype extensibility in general
As part of it’s 13.0 release this week, Teradata is productizing its geospatial datatype, which previously was just a downloadable library. (Edit: More precisely, Teradata announced 13.0, which will actually be shipped some time in 2009.) What Teradata Geospatial now amounts to is:
- User-defined functions (UDF) written by Teradata (this is the part that existed before).
- (Possibly new) Enhanced implementations of the Teradata geospatial UDFs, for better performance.
- (Definitely new) Optimizer awareness of the Teradata geospatial UDFs.
Teradata also intends in the future to implement actual geospatial indexing; candidates include r-trees and tesselation.
Hearing this was a good wake-up call for me, because in the past I’ve conflated two issues on datatype extensibility, namely:
- Whether the query executer uses a special access method (i.e., index type) for the datatype
- Whether the optimizer is aware of the datatypes.
But as Teradata just pointed out, those two issues can indeed be separated from each other.
| Categories: Data types, Data warehousing, GIS and geospatial, Teradata | 1 Comment |
Quick guide to Teradata’s announcements this week
The Teradata Partners (i.e., user) conference is this week. So there have been lots of press releases, some presentations, lots of meetings, and so on. A lot of Teradata’s messaging is in flux, as it moves fairly rapidly to correct what I believe have been some deficiencies in the past. One confusing result is that there was very little prebriefing about the actual announcement details, and we’re all scrambling to figure out what’s up.
Teradata does a good job of collecting its press releases at one URL. So without linking to most of them individually, let me jump in to an overview of Teradata news this week (whether or not in actual press release format): Read more
| Categories: Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, Teradata | 9 Comments |
Patrick Walravens’ SAP/Teradata speculation doesn’t make much sense
A persistent analyst named Patrick Walravens keeps speculating about an SAP acquisition of Teradata. So far as I can tell, Walravens is the sole source of this rumor, evidently because he actually thinks the combination would make some kind of business sense.
An example of the “logic” behind this theory is:
Mr. Walravens’s latest evidence pointing to such a move stems from the expected departure of a SAP executive who had been running the company’s NetWeaver software line, which includes a data warehouse package.
At a guess, Walravens is saying that Teradata’s products and SAP’s BI Accelerator somehow substitute for each other in the marketplace. If you believe that comparison, I’d like to sell you a railroad locomotive made by Jaguar. Read more
| Categories: Data warehousing, SAP AG, Teradata | 5 Comments |
Netezza and Teradata on analytic geospatial data management
Geospatial data management is one of the flavors of the month:
- Last week, Teradata claimed it has the most sophisticated analytic geospatial data management capability.
- Also last week, Netezza’s newly acquired Netezza Spatial technology attracted a lot of attention.
- This week, Oracle called attention to its geospatial capabilities.
So I asked Netezza and Teradata what this geospatial analytics stuff is all about. Read more
| Categories: Analytic technologies, Data warehousing, GIS and geospatial, Netezza, Teradata | 3 Comments |