Teradata First to Provide Business Analysts Direct, Self-Service Access to Data in Apache Hadoop

SAN DIEGO, June 12, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- Teradata (NYSE: TDC), the leading analytic data solutions company, today announced that the Aster SQL-H™ software is the first to offer business analysts a seamless bridge between standard business intelligence (BI) applications and big data sets stored in Apache™ Hadoop^. The Aster SQL-H capabilities enable businesses to discover the invisible nuggets of value, which provide intelligence to power the best decision possible.

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Businesses are capturing massive quantities of data from sources like Web logs, machine data, and text, and inexpensively storing it in the Hadoop Distributed File Systems (HDFS). However, users have been challenged when trying to use standard business intelligence applications and tools to access and analyze the many types of data, because of complexity and incompatibility. "Business users are clamoring for more access to big data analytics, and Teradata puts this new capability directly into decision makers' hands," said Scott Gnau, president, Teradata Labs. "Aster SQL-H is a significant advancement for business analysts trying to utilize raw, multi-structured data in Hadoop files to develop new insights for competitive advantage."

"Teradata's approach is a significant new development, because it creates a transparent bridge allowing business users to dig deep into data stored in Hadoop files," said Colin White, president, BI Research. "The benefit to customers is that they don't have to retool their traditional BI department or staff-up a new, expensive programming team." 

"Aster SQL-H provides value on two levels. This is the first time in the industry that standard query language or SQL access can be transparently and seamlessly provided for Hadoop data," said Tasso Arygros, co-president, Teradata Aster. "Secondly, a lot of the unique assets and advantages of the Aster MapReduce platform, including our 50-plus pre-built MapReduce analytical applications and the patented SQL-MapReduce® interface are made available to analyze Hadoop data. The business value is huge – more analytics and better enterprise use of data at a fraction of the time and cost."

The Aster SQL-H capability is a new and important component of the Teradata Aster software portfolio, which includes Teradata Aster MapReduce Platform, Aster Database software, SQL-MapReduce®, and the Aster MapReduce Analytics Portfolio. The software runs on the Aster MapReduce Appliance, which is workload-specific to meet the demands of big data analytics, including the ability to scale, and perform at high speed. Teradata's integrated hardware and software solutions enable deeper analytic insights into multi-structured data and support new analytic capabilities driven by the need for the discovery of business insights.

"Teradata Aster powers the digital marketing platform that gives our clients multi-channel behavioral insights to better understand the impact that various media have on driving value to the business across consumer segments," said Matthew Comstock, vice president, business intelligence, Razorfish. "Aster SQL-H enables us to leverage our existing analyst skillsets and BI tools for easy ad-hoc access to raw data we store in Hadoop, without writing and maintaining custom code. This increases our analysts' productivity, allowing them to focus their efforts on adding value to the client."

Aster SQL-H provides a software access method for easy analysis of data stored in Hadoop. Aster SQL-H empowers business analysts to directly analyze vast amounts of Hadoop data without requiring MapReduce development skills, or an understanding of how or where data is stored within HDFS. It leverages the open source Apache HCatalog project, which offers metadata to simplify access. Hortonworks is one of the main contributors to the HCatalog project. This announcement is a result of the Teradata-Hortonworks partnership.

"Teradata has shown their commitment to helping customers get more value from data by co-developing easier access to data in Hadoop and by using the latest technologies coming from the Apache Hadoop community. With the HCatalog integration, Aster SQL-H makes big analytics easier for business analysts and data scientists, as well as, IT administrators by easing the access to Hadoop data through standard ANSI SQL and BI tools. Even more, the portfolio of SQL-MapReduce analytic functions provide rich analytics to the Hadoop community, giving enterprises deeper analytic insights to improve business performance," said Rob Bearden, chief executive officer, Hortonworks.

Aster SQL-H is a feature of Aster Database 5.0 software, which will be generally available in the third quarter of 2012. For more details on how Aster SQL-H unlocks the value of data in Hadoop, visit www.asterdata.com/sqlh.

For more information about Aster-Hadoop solutions, please register for the June 21 Webcast: Back to the Future – MapReduce, Hadoop & the Data Scientist.

About Teradata Aster

The Teradata Aster MapReduce Platform is the market-leading big data analytics solution. This discovery platform embeds MapReduce analytic processing for deeper insights on new data sources and multi-structured data types to deliver analytic capabilities with breakthrough performance and scalability. Teradata's solution utilizes Aster's patented SQL-MapReduce® to parallelize the processing of data and applications and deliver rich analytic insights at scale. Companies including Barnes & Noble, Intuit, LinkedIn, and Gilt Groupe use Teradata Aster to deliver applications such as digital marketing optimization, social network and relationship analysis, and data science. Visit www.asterdata.com for more information

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.

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