Real-Time Agility Made Possible by Latest Teradata Technology

WASHINGTON, Oct. 22, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- Teradata (NYSE: TDC), the leading analytic data solutions company, today announced new Teradata Database capabilities, including workload management features, Teradata Data Lab with Smart Loader, Teradata Studio, and Teradata Virtual Machine Edition. With today's announcement, Teradata continues to push technology boundaries, with more than 200 new capabilities released in the previous two years. These include analytical innovations in the areas of columnar, geospatial, hybrid storage, private cloud and temporal. These most recent innovations simplify and automate database management, expand self-service, and provide flexible deployment options.

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"Teradata draws on the intelligence of the best and brightest engineers in its labs located in the U.S. and around the world to provide capabilities that pay tangible dividends for our customers," said Scott Gnau, president, Teradata Labs. "Teradata earned its place as a data warehouse trailblazer by consistently delivering industry-leading product innovations that enable our customers to be more agile and productive in ways that power revenue growth."

Workload Management
Effective workload management is critical to ensure that business users get timely answers to their questions. The Teradata Database offers two enhanced levels of workload management to simplify and automate data management - Integrated Workload Management and Teradata Active System Management.

Teradata Integrated Workload Management is now available across all Teradata workload specific platforms. Teradata Integrated Workload Management enhances control over system resources by adding disk and I/O control in addition to managing central processing units (CPU) to ensure fair use of the valuable system resources. With "deterministic prioritization," Teradata ensures that the most important work gets done first and also provides mechanisms to stabilize the response times and maximize resource usage during planned and unplanned peaks. The ability to give operational workloads high priority has been a long-standing Teradata capability. Now with the "tactical tier" capability, Teradata provides even more performance for agile workloads. For example, this is important when the data warehouse is processing analytical reports and a frontline call center representative submits a query to the database to get an immediate answer to a customer's question.

With Teradata Active System Management (TASM), customers with a Teradata Active Enterprise Data Warehouse can be assured that business users' queries get the priority they deserve. The new workload management feature, Service Level Goal Prioritization, allows administrators to allocate resource usage based on tiers of users or specific groups. For example, frontline call center representatives can be assigned a set of database service level goals that meet their unique customer service business intelligence needs. Marketing, finance, and human resources can be assigned different service level goals based on their business needs. The new Virtual Partition feature, also a part of TASM, now enables system resources to be allocated for users based on specific geographic regions, business units, or other categories. For example, organizations with operations in different geographic regions can ensure that one region's usage won't impact other regions' use of the same data warehouse. These workload management features require Teradata Database 14 with SLES 11, which will be available by the end of 2012.

Teradata Studio
Teradata Studio is a new all-in-one tool that simplifies database administration for Teradata. Teradata consolidated multiple tools into one, and with a simple point-and-click capability, administrators can perform hundreds of functions. Teradata Studio offers a whole new way to visualize and manage the database and dramatically reduce the steps necessary to perform everyday management tasks. Built in the robust Java and Eclipse Rich Client Platform (RCP) framework, Teradata Studio has been designed as an open tools platform and can run on Windows™, Linux, and Mac OS^® operating systems. Teradata customers will benefit from the many high quality Eclipse features focused on administration and the scratch pad query tool. Teradata Studio is easy for the administrator to install and setup.

Teradata Data Lab with Smart Loader
In order to meet the demands of business analytics, analysts and data scientists want to be able to load data without needing to rely on IT. The new smart loader feature of Teradata Studio provides Teradata Data Lab users self-service and easy point-and-click capability to empower users to load data that isn't already in the data warehouse. This feature creates tables that dynamically provide the freedom to experiment with analytics and explore the creative uses of data within the database, which ultimately transforms data into intelligence needed to propel the business.

Analysts can load external data into their data lab for analysis in combination with production data, test new analytic theories, and collaborate with other users. With Teradata Data Lab, innovative companies can rapidly test new theories that can lead to breakthrough ideas and results.  

Teradata Virtual Machine Edition
To provide customers with flexible Teradata Database deployment options, the new Teradata Virtual Machine Edition 14 can be dynamically deployed on the current VMware ESXi™ private cloud infrastructure. The Teradata Virtual Machine Edition is delivered on a virtual symmetric multiprocessing system (SMP) with the Teradata Database installed. The Teradata Virtual Machine Edition offers the database administrator or developer a robust place to test new Teradata software releases, experiment with physical database design changes, or prototype applications. Teradata leverages the flexible and agile VMware private cloud environment to accelerate the development and test process by removing constraints on system deployment choices, thus increasing the chances for breakthrough business results. Once development and testing is completed, the verified changes or new application can be applied to the production Teradata Database environment running on a Teradata workload-specific platform.

Available with customer service support, Teradata Virtual Machine Edition accommodates work with more than two terabytes of data. With minimal IT administrative personnel or procurement department involvement, a virtual system can be created in minutes. Teradata Virtual Machine Edition delivers a standalone symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) Teradata system through the VMware virtualization environment to provide additional test and development flexibility and efficiency, complementing the ability to use Teradata's existing workload specific platforms for more scalable and higher performance test and development.

"The desire for automated decision-making and better business intelligence capabilities will drive enterprises to capture more data than what can be used. These requirements put pressure on the database to manage more data and applications, thus driving enterprises to seek out innovative technology," said Neil Raden, chief executive officer and principal analyst, Hired Brains. "Thinly stretched database administrators will seek out easy-to-use, self-administering databases, to reduce complexity and speed support to the frontlines of business."

These four new or enhanced capabilities are a part of a larger group of analytical innovations that Teradata recently brought to market in the areas of columnar, geospatial, hybrid storage, private cloud and temporal.

Teradata Columnar
Companies no longer have to deploy a separate system to take advantage of columnar performance. Teradata set a new standard with the announcement of Teradata Columnar, which fully integrates column and row-based tables, establishing new levels of flexibility, performance, and compression. Unlike other relational database vendors, the columnar capability from Teradata allows users to mix-and-match column and row-based physical storage within the data warehouse to meet the requirement of the applications.

"We were impressed by the flexibility, performance, and compression during our testing of Teradata Columnar. We're getting unmatched performance from our Teradata Database today, and we anticipate the use of Teradata Columnar will take our performance and compression to the next level, without requiring query or application changes," said Kevin C. Wyderka, director, Data Warehouse and Business Intelligence, Cars.com.

Private Cloud
The Teradata Active Data Warehouse Private Cloud provides Elastic Performance on Demand. With Elastic Performance on Demand users can access extra data warehouse resources to seamlessly address sudden surges in business activity, driven by such events as the launch of major marketing campaigns, unexpectedly high demands in fad-driven manufacturing orders, or seasonal holiday demand swings. Teradata systems are designed to utilize full computing resources, and with a pay-for-use pricing approach for data warehousing, companies can deliver business users the flexibility to meet ongoing analytic demands.  

"In the retail business, sometimes a product will become popular very quickly. We need extra analytic firepower during those times to meet this unplanned demand. Teradata's Active Data Warehouse Private Cloud gives us the elastic performance we need, when we need it, on a pay-per-use basis. With this burst capacity, we can quickly scale to meet the dynamic needs of our business users," said Oliver Ratzesberger, vice president Information Analytics and Innovation, Sears Holdings Corporation.

Temporal Analytics
The Teradata Database was the first to deliver intelligent temporal analytics making it easier for customers to create a historical picture of enterprise business transactions and activities. In doing so, companies have the power to select a historical point in time and analyze data based on the retrospective view. Temporal analytics helps customers uncover unique insights and patterns about their business. The Teradata Database automatically executes the complex modifications and inserts the required data to maintain a complete change history when a user submits a simple update command.

"Using the Teradata Temporal functionality, we have been able to expand temporal history to critical components in our data warehouse. Business users across Belk's marketing, merchandising and operations will have more detailed insight to ensure the merchandise that shoppers want is available, when they want it," said Glenn Dick, director, Information Delivery, Belk. "In addition, Teradata Temporal automatically handles effective dates and history when we load data, eliminating lengthy, in-house developed post-processing methods, and decreasing our time-to-market for sourcing new data. It provides all the benefits of systemically controlling time, while the database does the work."

Geospatial Data and Location Analysis
Geospatial data and RFID systems are growing and becoming commonplace. The location data they offer are important for strategic and operational intelligence. Teradata allows customers to store and process geospatial data along with other business data when responding to queries. The results of the analysis can be delivered through a business intelligence tool, or shown on a map or other visualization tool. Teradata is the first provider with high performance geospatial capabilities built into the data warehouse. The geospatial capability adds another data dimension for customers seeking to increase the intelligence abilities of their business.

Hybrid Storage Technologies
The Teradata Database has the industry's only intelligent virtual storage solution, which automatically migrates data between drive types based on its frequency of use or temperature. This achieves optimum performance to meet the extreme service level demands of business users. Teradata Virtual Storage places the data on the most cost effective storage device. In addition, users have easy access to the data because it can all be kept in the warehouse for faster business decision-making. The data no longer needs to be moved or placed in different storage mediums.

Teradata Virtual Storage leverages solid state and hard disk drives, to achieve more intelligent multi-temperature data management where the "hot" data is the most frequently used and "cold" data is least used. Staff intervention is not required with Teradata's automated self-managing design, which eliminates laborious database administration.

Relevant Links

Gartner Magic Quadrant – "Leading Analyst Firm Places Teradata as a Leader in Data Warehouse Database Management Systems"

The Forrester Wave™ - "Independent Analyst Firm Declares Teradata the Most Scalable, Flexible Cloud-Capable EDW Solution in Today's Market"

Information Difference research firm ranked Teradata as leading analytic data solutions company

San Diego Magazine Innovation Award - Top Tech award from San Diego Magazine

Other awards

About Teradata
Teradata Corporation (NYSE: TDC) is the world's leading analytic data solutions company, focused on integrated data warehousing, big data analytics, and business applications. Teradata's innovative products and services deliver data integration and business insight to empower organizations to make the best decisions possible for competitive advantage. Visit teradata.com for details.

Teradata is a trademark or registered trademark of Teradata Corporation in the United States and other countries.

SOURCE Teradata Corporation