Teradata Helps Companies Break Free From Competitors' Databases

SAN DIEGO, Sept. 29, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- To help companies develop rich, robust, and timely business intelligence, Teradata (NYSE: TDC) today announced the expansion of its data and application migration capabilities to make it easier for customers to move to its platforms.

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"Organizations are moving to Teradata's analytic platforms because of the problems they face trying to adapt general purpose databases to business intelligence and analytic workloads. After making the move, these organizations report finding new business opportunities because they can use data in creative and less-restricted ways than were available in the past," said Mark Madsen, research analyst, Third Nature, Inc.

"The legacy implementation had grown so large because of PayPal's success that a lot of the legacy processes were starting to take more than 24 hours to run; that was just unacceptable to the business. So, we had no choice, but to try to optimize and migrate to Teradata. Teradata was absolutely the right platform," said Clay Stanley, director of Information Management Delivery, PayPal, Inc.

Companies migrate to analytic databases for four reasons:

1. slow or unpredictable performance,
2. inadequate scalability,
3. need for new analytic capabilities, and
4. to reduce IT complexity and associated costs.

By moving their business and financial data, data marts, and real-time analytic applications away from general-purpose OLTP databases to Teradata analytic platforms, companies avoid these four weaknesses, while creating new possibilities for the use of data.

"Companies have reported that they migrated to Teradata to overcome the weaknesses of other databases like inadequate performance, insufficient scalability, limited analytic capability, complexity, and higher costs. Teradata excels in these areas where others stumble," said Chris Twogood, director, product and services marketing, Teradata Corporation. "Teradata has helped hundreds of industry-leading companies with thousands of applications migrate to a Teradata data warehouse platform. In spite of the many appliances that have entered the market, our pace of migrations has increased. In fact, our head-to-head win rate is at an all-time high."

Online transaction processing (OLTP) refers to the processing of data entry and retrieval transactions, which support enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications.  A bank's automatic teller machine (ATM) is an example of a transaction processing application. Companies that used OLTP databases for data warehousing discovered OLTP's severe limitations.  These databases are transaction-oriented databases and are not built for data warehouse deployments. These transaction databases could not meet the enterprise's demands for business intelligence.  The environments were no longer able to scale with the growth of the business, or meet demanding workloads. In addition, they are known for higher labor costs, poor data processing performance, and increased complexity. Customers have discovered that Teradata data warehouse platforms can accommodate a greater number of users, provide faster response time to queries and run complex queries, including both strategic and tactical workloads, compared to OLTP systems.

Unparalleled benefits

Teradata's expertise with the migration of customers offers unparalleled benefits:

• Integrated data offers a single view of your business
• The reduced maintenance and simplified architecture eliminates 70 percent, or more, of database administrator’s tasks and reduces lines of code by more than 50 percent
• Load processing time is cut by 50 percent
• Query concurrency has been increased by eight times, or more
• Ad hoc query performance is improved by 10 times or more

Teradata has expanded its data and application migration capabilities, which includes the Teradata Database 14 additions and Teradata migration tools:

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 is often stored in numerous formats. Teradata systems coverts it 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 migration tools

The latest migration tool, Teradata Migration Accelerator, automatically migrates data structures, indexes, views, tables, code, and company data from other databases to Teradata. The applications extract data, convert the data types, create new tables, move the data to a Teradata database, and then validate the process. In addition, the tool automatically translates procedural code into standard relational code.

Relevant news links

1. Data Warehouse Migration Service -http://www.teradata.com/business-needs/data-warehouse-migration/

About Teradata

Teradata (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 empower organizations to integrate, analyze and profit from data for competitive advantage.  Visit teradata.com for details.

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SOURCE Teradata