Teradata

Teradata is a relational database management system (RDBMS) that drives a company's data warehouse. Teradata provides the foundation to give a company the power to grow, to compete in today's dynamic marketplace, to achieve the goal of "Transforming Transactions into Relationships" and to evolve the business by getting answers to a new generation of questions. Teradata's scalability allows the system to grow as the business grows, from gigabytes to terabytes and beyond. Teradata's unique technology has been proven at customer sites across industries and around the world.

Teradata is an open system, compliant with ANSI standards. It is currently available on UNIX MP-RAS and Windows 2000 operating systems. Teradata is a large database server that accommodates multiple client applications making inquiries against it concurrently. Various client platforms access the database through a TCP-IP connection across an IBM mainframe channel connection. The ability to manage large amounts of data is accomplished using the concept of parallelism, wherein many individual processors perform smaller tasks concurrently to accomplish an operation against a huge repository of data. To date, only parallel architectures can handle databases of this size.

What is Teradata ?

Teradata is a relational database management system initially created by the firm with the same name, founded in 1979. Teradata is part of the NCR Corporation which acquired the Teradata company on February 28, 1991. It is a massively parallel processing system running a shared nothing architecture. The main point with the Teradata DBMS is that it's linearly and predictably scalable in all dimensions of a database system workload (data volume, breadth, number of users, complexity of queries), explaining its popularity for enterprise data warehousing applications. Teradata is offered on Intel servers interconnected by the BYNET messaging fabric. Teradata systems are offered with either Engenio or EMC disk arrays for database storage.

Teradata offers a choice of several operating systems

NCR UNIX SVR4 MP-RAS, a variant of System V UNIX from AT&T Microsoft Windows 2000 and Windows Server 2003 SUSE Linux on 64-bit Intel servers has been pre-announced for 2006. Teradata Enterprise Data Warehouses are often accessed via ODBC or JDBC by applications running on operating system such as Microsoft Windows or flavors of UNIX. The warehouse typically sources data from operational systems via a combination of batch and trickle loads.

The largest and most prominent customer of this DBMS is Wal-Mart, which runs its central inventory and other financial systems on Teradata. Wal-Mart's Teradata Data Warehouse is generally regarded by the DBS industry as being the largest data warehouse in the world. Other Teradata customers include companies like AT&T (formerly SBC), Dell, Continental Airlines, National Australia Bank, FedEx, Vodafone, Gap Inc, Safeway Inc, eBay and Kaiser Permanente.

Teradata's main competitors are other high-end solutions such as Oracle and IBM's DB2.

Why Teradata?

Teradata is the world's leading Enterprise Data Warehousing solutions provider . Today, more than 60% of the world's most admired global companies use Teradata technology, including:

• 90% of the Top Global Telecommunications Companies 
• 50% of the Top Global Retailers 
• 70% of the Top Global Airlines 
• 60% of the Top Global Transportation Logistics Companies 
• 40% of the Top Global Commercial and Savings Banks

Along with our proven, time-tested leadership in data warehousing, Teradata offers a wide variety of solutions for Customer Relationship Management, Supply and Demand Chain Management, Financial Services, Enterprise Risk Management and much more. Add accolades and awards from Gartner, Intelligent Enterprise, DM Review and many other industry experts, and Teradata is clearly the best choice.

Things Teradata Database Administrators Never Have to Do

Teradata DBAs never have to do the following tasks:

• Reorganize data or index space.

• Pre-allocate table/index space and format partitioning. While it is possible to have partitioned indexes in Teradata, they are not required.

• Pre-prepare data for loading (convert, sort, split, etc.).

• Unload/reload data spaces due to expansion. With Teradata, the data can be redistributed on the larger configuration with no offloading and reloading required.

• Write or run programs to split input source files into partitions for loading.

With Teradata, the workload for creating a table of 100 rows is the same as creating a table with 1,000,000,000 rows. Teradata DBAs know that if data doubles, the system can expand easily to accommodate it. Teradata provides huge cost advantages, especially when it comes to staffing Database Administrators. Customers tell us that their DBA staff requirements for administering non-Teradata databases are three to 10 times higher.

Teradata Architecture

Teradata acts as a single data store, with multiple client applications making inquiries against it concurrently. Instead of replicating a database for different purposes, with Teradata you store the data once and use it for all clients. Teradata provides the same connectivity for an entry-level system as it does for a massive enterprise data warehouse.

A Teradata system contains one or more nodes. A node is a term for a processing unit under the control of a single operating system. The node is where the processing occurs for the Teradata Database. There are two types of Teradata systems:

• Symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) - An SMP Teradata system has a single node that contains multiple CPUs sharing a memory pool.

• Massively parallel processing (MPP) - Multiple SMP nodes working together comprise a larger, MPP implementation of Teradata. The nodes are connected using the BYNET, which allows multiple virtual processors on multiple nodes to communicate with each other.

Teradata is the future of the Data Mining. In future everyone we start using Teradata Database. Now it is costly, works are going on to reduce its cost. So, it will reach to small business people also.