September 20, 2006

Teradata vs. the new appliance vendors, technically

Todd Walter and Randy Lea of Teradata gave generously of their time today, ducking out of their user conference, and shared their take on issues we’ve been discussing here recently. Overall, Teradata response to the data warehouse appliance guys is essentially: “Well, those may be fine for specific queries, or for data marts, but in true blended enterprise data warehouse workloads we’re superior, including in performance.”

Specific takeaways included:

Teradata also claims a number of features that are more reminiscent of a full DBMS than an appliance (although there’s a hierarchy of appliances, with Netezza’s software features being more limited than those of, say, DATallegro or Greenplum).

Comments

4 Responses to “Teradata vs. the new appliance vendors, technically”

  1. Stuart Frost on September 20th, 2006 11:59 pm

    Wow, so the mighty Teradata has finally admitted that we exist. I’m truly honored.

    I think it’s kind of amusing that all of a sudden Teradata is claiming to do everything we do – shame they can’t match us on price or performance.

    OK, that’s slightly facetious, since there are some areas in large-scale ‘Active Warehousing’ where they still have a lead. However, there are a lot of data warehousing projects for which we simply have the better, easier to use product at a far lower price.

    Stuart
    DATAllegro

  2. DBMS2 — DataBase Management System Services»Blog Archive » Competitive issues in data warehouse ease of administration on September 23rd, 2006 3:47 am

    […] Teradata also has preconfigured hardware. It does have indices, but rather simple ones. Plus it has join indices. And it has a few more configuration options in other areas (e.g., block size) than the other appliance vendors. (Yes, I count Teradata among the appliances.) […]

  3. DBMS2 — DataBase Management System Services»Blog Archive » Arguments AGAINST data warehouse appliances on January 23rd, 2007 5:51 am

    […] But the true story is more mixed. Teradata continues to this day as a major data warehouse technology player, and as far as I’m concerned Teradata indeed makes appliances. If we look further than the applications stack, we find that appliances actually occupy a large and growing share of the computing market. So a persuasive anti-appliance argument has to do more than just invoke the names of Britton-Lee and Symbolics. […]

  4. Mael on July 9th, 2007 9:50 pm

    A database appliance compared to Teradata is like comparing a bottle rocket to a rocketship or a toaster oven to a full fledge stove. One certainly can cook all their meals quickly in a toaster oven but who would want to let alone try to cater to an audience of thousands. Teradata is a full fledge RDBMS and has been since it was designed to be a shared nothing parallel linearly scalable database. No other solution is even comparable where mixed workloads and simultaneous complex queries are concerned. I think appliances have a niche market however I think they shouldn’t call themselves data warehouse appliances because what they really are are data mart appliances.

    Teradata on the otherhand is a node based system that scales and gets faster as it scales and the whole organization benefits. The complexity or lack there of ones queries or indexes is entirely up to those implementing it unlike most appliances which excel the more specialized they become. As for Join indexes not being referenced by SQL it is because they don’t have to be, they are utilized transparently.

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