Teradata Database: the Smartest Database for the Smartest Analytics

SAN DIEGO, Sept. 22, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- Teradata (NYSE: TDC), the leading analytic data solutions company, today announced Teradata Database 14 a breakthrough database that makes an organization's analytics environment faster, smarter, and far more intuitive. The Teradata Database is designed to untangle complexities IT confronts in this era of big data, expanding application portfolios, security pressures, and ballooning workloads.

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With the enhancements and additions to the Teradata Database, enterprises will be able to deploy their data warehouses more quickly and deliver faster time to business value for users analytics users. They will have new power to turn complex data into dynamic solutions, calibrating it for peak performance.  Also, by improving the innate intelligence built into the database, Teradata makes data warehouse operations far simpler, reducing the hands-on labor required to achieve unprecedented levels of performance.

"Teradata Database is the industry's most intelligent, high-performance database for analytics. Period," said Scott Gnau, president Teradata Labs, Teradata Corporation. "It has deep intelligence that can automate time-consuming functions across a range of tasks -- from workload management and compression decisions to virtual partition and temporal conditions.  This dramatically improves the data warehouse's overall performance and manageability. Teradata has always been second to none in terms of speed and ease of use - with Teradata Database 14, we extend that leadership."

A Smarter Database for the Smartest Analytics

Running an integrated data warehouse for business intelligence takes "intelligence." In addition to the savvy business analysts and IT staff working with the system, the database itself needs intelligent automation built into its workload management, security, data migration, compression, and temporal capabilities. The Teradata Database enhances existing capabilities and adds completely new features in all of these areas.

"While most of the attention, naturally, gets focused on a new database's raw performance improvements, more often than not it's the improvements to a system's overall performance and manageability that makes the information technology world better on a daily basis," said Neil Raden, vice president and Principal Analyst, Constellation Research. "What matters most is that the database continuously achieves its objectives. Teradata continues to lead in both manageability and informing and activating business decisions."

Each new feature and enhancement in the Teradata Database have been customer-driven, each designed to support business users who are creating new value or "data equity" for their organizations with data analytics. The enhancements reflect real-world needs and priorities found in advanced analytics environments.

Workload management –

Teradata's industry-leading workload management now includes virtual partitions that allocate the system resources between groups or business units within a company. Once user priorities have been set, the Teradata Database applies "deterministic prioritization" to dynamically manage resources across the system to assure that workloads are supported appropriately. That is, low priority requests can have assigned resources diminished, while more resources can be given to address a spike in higher priority user demands. This ensures that business units with high priority projects are allocated high priority system resources (including CPUs and I/O) that they need, meeting service level agreements or business objectives.

Teradata's workload management supports companies as they strive to leverage exploding data volumes – from massive volumes of traditional data, and emerging big data generated by social media, web interactions, e-commerce, sensors, machines, and mobile devices.  The Teradata Database is able to respond to new requirements to exploit diverse types of data with real-time analytics.

For example, the Teradata Database uses Virtual Partitions to divide available system resources into partitions or compartments to meet the workload needs of an application or group.  This can be used, for example, to mirror a charge-back allocation of data warehouse investment, where marketing may fund and, therefore, be allocated 35 percent of the system, manufacturing may be allocated 25 percent, finance may be allocated 30 percent, and other departments may be allocated the remaining 10 percent.

But even more granular workload management can be applied to the system. In our example, marketing could define their priorities and the system administrators could define a workload management scheme to control marketing's allocation of the system to ensure that website customization gets top priority and runs as a tactical workload to ensure service level agreement attainment. In contrast, segmentation analysis receives fewer resources because it has a lower priority, in line with less stringent performance requirements. At the same time, finance can define a very different workload management scheme based on a combination of applications and the calendar, so that month-end and quarter-end closing of financial reports have top priority when needed.

Compress on Cold – The Teradata Database has enhanced the use of hybrid storage to achieve more intelligent multi-temperature data management where the "hot" data is the most frequently used and "cold" data is least used.  It is the industry's only intelligent virtual storage solution that automatically migrates and compresses, or decompresses, data between drive types to achieve optimum performance and storage utilization.  This keeps data from turning into dead data.

Teradata Database 14 intelligently manages data to maximize performance while optimizing the return on system resources.  It automatically compresses the coldest or the least frequently used data on the system to save disk storage space.  Keeping data in its natural decompressed format when it is frequently used maximizes performance by avoiding repeated decompression processing.  Automatically compressing the data when it is less frequently used enables the storage of the most data at the most effective costs. No staff intervention is required with Teradata's automated self-managing design.

With big data becoming pervasive, there's a critical need for a database to be smart enough to dynamically judge how "hot" or "cold" data is for an organization. The hotter, more popular, data need to be located on the fastest storage devices while less active, cooler data can be pushed onto slower media. Cold data is compressed up to five times to keep storage costs to a minimum. With the Teradata Database, Teradata Virtual Storage increases intelligent management of data by automatically decompressing and relocating once cold data onto faster storage systems as demand for the data heats up. For example, the Teradata Database will recognize when monthly year-over-year data should be cycled in or out of archival media as needed and without laborious database administration intervention.

Enhanced temporal capability – Teradata continues to extend and enhance its time-aware, temporal capability that empowers customers to capture and track changes in the history of evolving business data. Teradata's database creates a full picture of an organization's business at any point in time -- and now, from any point on the globe.

Teradata Database temporal feature now has the flexibility to take advantage of the unique variations in global business calendars. For example, applications using time-specific data analyzed on a weekly basis, such as salary or inventory information, can automatically account for business calendars that begin a work week on Sunday in one part of the world with equivalent data from other parts of the globe where the work week starts on Monday.

Security - Security has been bolstered with new Teradata Row Level Security, permitting only those with proper authorization to access information at granular levels. For example, regional sales managers may be given access to other regions' aggregate sales figures, while withholding individual sales staff bookings and compensation.  Concurrently, human resources or sales administrators could see only a ranking of individual sales staff for incentive programs, but not given any access to aggregate or regional data. The level of security can be as deep and as layered as necessary.

Application migration – application portability and data migration

Teradata has expanded its ability to easily migrate applications and data from other less performant platforms, and seamlessly manage emerging "big data" problems.  Some of the capabilities include:

Teradata Database 14 additions - New features in the Teradata Database make it even easier to migrate data and associated applications from competitive databases. Teradata 14 has added several new functions and data types that ease migrations from OLTP databases, including:  

• Regular Expression Functions - eliminate the complex programming necessary to interpret web logs and other text strings in structured query language (SQL).
• Date Functions – offer a shortcut that reduces programming time by converting and manipulating information related to date and time, which may be stored in numerous formats, into a consistent format, and validates the data.
• New data types (ARRAY and NUMBER data types) – Teradata is now able to migrate, store and analyze data in additional data types or formats not previously used by the Teradata database, without converting it. This simplifies and speeds the migration.  

Teradata Database 14 will be available in December 2011, and the beta version is now available.  Teradata Database is the high performing analytical engine that powers all of the company's purpose-built platform family. This includes: Teradata Active Enterprise Data Warehouse, the Data Warehouse Appliance, Extreme Performance Appliance, Extreme Data Appliance, and the Data Mart Appliance. In addition to the five members of the Teradata Purpose-Built Platform family, Teradata Database 14 is also available as the software only Data Mart Edition and Teradata Express for cloud computing solutions

Relevant news links

1. "Meeting Demands for Data Warehouse Performance," Neil Raden, http://www.teradata.com/WorkArea/DownloadAsset.aspx?id=2700

2. "Keeping Pace with Changing, Growing User Demands," Teradata Website

http://www.teradata.com/resources/brochures/Teradata-Active-System-Management-eb3625/?type=BR

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