Teradata

Analysis of data warehousing giant Teradata. Related subjects include:

February 8, 2012

Comments on the analytic DBMS industry and Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for same

This year’s Gartner Magic Quadrant for Data Warehouse Database Management Systems is out.* I shall now comment, just as I did on the 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, and 2006 Gartner Data Warehouse Database Management System Magic Quadrants, to varying extents. To frame the discussion, let me start by saying:

*At the time of this posting, I don’t yet have a link. However, I expect that to change quickly, and I plan to edit this paragraph accordingly. If nothing else, I hope people will drop links into the comment thread.

Specific company comments, roughly in line with Gartner’s rough single-dimensional rank ordering, include: Read more

November 28, 2011

Terminology: Data mustering

I find myself in need of a word or phrase that means bring data together from various sources so that it’s ready to be used, where the use can be analysis or operations. The first words I thought of were “aggregation” and “collection,” but they both have other meanings in IT. Even “data marshalling” has a specific meaning different from what I want. So instead, I’ll go with data mustering.

I mean for the term “data mustering” to encompass at least three scenarios:

Let me explain what I mean by each.  Read more

October 3, 2011

Teradata Unity and the idea of active-active data warehouse replication

Teradata is having its annual conference, Teradata Partners, at the same time as Oracle OpenWorld this week. That made it an easy decision for Teradata to preannounce its big news, Teradata Columnar and the rest of Teradata 14. But of course it held some stuff back, notably Teradata Unity, which is the name chosen for replication technology based on Teradata’s Xkoto acquisition.

The core mission of Teradata Unity is asynchronous, near-real-time replication across Teradata systems. The point of “asynchronous” is performance. The point of “near-real-time” is that it Teradata Unity can be used for high availability and disaster recovery, and further can be used to allow real work on HA and DR database copies. Teradata Unity works request-at-a-time, which limits performance somewhat;* Unity has a lock manager that makes sure updates are applied in the same order on all copies, in cases where locks are needed at all.

Read more

September 26, 2011

Highlights of a busy news week

I put up 14 posts over the past week, so perhaps you haven’t had a chance yet to read them all. :) Highlights included:

Most of the posts, however, were reactions to news events. In particular:

September 25, 2011

Workload management and RAM

Closing out my recent round of Teradata-related posts, here’s a little anomaly:

Read more

September 24, 2011

Confusion about Teradata’s big customers

Evidently further attempts to get information on this subject would be fruitless, but anyhow:

September 22, 2011

Hybrid-columnar soundbites

Busy couple of days talking with reporters. A few notes on hybrid-columnar analytic DBMS, all backed up by yesterday’s post on Teradata columnar:

Edit: The Wall Street Journal got this wrong, writing that Teradata was the first-ever hybrid columnar system. Specifically, they wrote

While columnar technology has been around for years, Teradata says its product is unique because it allows users to include both columns and rows in the same database.

Googling on “Teradata To Unveil New Analytics Product To Speed Business Adoption” might get you around the paywall to see the offending piece.

September 22, 2011

Aster Database Release 5 and Teradata Aster appliance

It was obviously just a matter of time before there would be an Aster appliance from Teradata and some tuned bidirectional Teradata-Aster connectivity. These have now been announced. I didn’t notice anything particularly surprising in the details of either. About the biggest excitement is that Aster is traditionally a Red Hat shop, but for the purposes of appliance delivery has now embraced SUSE Linux.

Along with the announcements comes updated positioning such as:

and of course

Read more

September 22, 2011

Teradata Columnar and Teradata 14 compression

Teradata is pre-announcing Teradata 14, for delivery by the end of this year, where by “Teradata 14″ I mean the latest version of the DBMS that drives the classic Teradata product line. Teradata 14′s flagship feature is Teradata Columnar, a hybrid-columnar offering that follows in the footsteps of Greenplum (now part of EMC) and Aster Data (now part of Teradata).

The basic idea of Teradata Columnar is:

Read more

September 8, 2011

Aster Data business trends

Last month, I reviewed with the Aster Data folks which markets they were targeting and selling into, subsequent to acquisition by their new orange overlords. The answers aren’t what they used to be. Aster no longer focuses much on what it used to call frontline (i.e., low-latency, operational) applications; those are of course a key strength for Teradata. Rather, Aster focuses on investigative analytics — they’ve long endorsed my use of the term — and on the batch run/scoring kinds of applications that inform operational systems.

Read more

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