The effective handling of analytics and data determines a company’s potential. Managing the data is vital in different sectors like telecommunications, airlines, healthcare, global retailers, transportation and so on. Teradata can be a solution to supporting huge data through its unique features. I first heard the name of Teradata as a data-warehousing company in some job site. Later, I got to know its features and the edge it has over other Relational database management systems (RDBMS).
Origin of Teradata
Teradata corporation was established as a collaboration between the researchers at Caltech and Citibank’s advanced technology group at Brentwood, CA in 1979. It holds the caption ‘The best decision possible’. Teradata provides Data-warehousing and Analytics products and services and products for Marketing Applications. It develops and sells RDBMS with the same name. In 1989, it entered into a partnership with NCR to build the next-generation data-warehouse systems for storing and managing large amounts of data. To highly focus on different businesses and to remain as market leaders, Teradata and NCR announced their separation in 2007. After a series of acquisitions and maintaining its standards on par with the latest trends, Teradata is now the world-leader in RDBMS and holds top ranking continuously when compared with other data-warehousing companies.
Introduction to Teradata
Teradata is an RDBMS which is
- It’s components and protocols confirm to standards irrespective of the supplier.
- It runs on Windows server or UNIX MP-RAS platform.
- It has the capacity to support concurrent users from different client platforms.
- It is ANSI compliant.
- It is built on parallel architecture.
Why only Teradata?
As I earlier said that Teradata is a world leader in data-warehousing, there must be some strong reasons why companies opt for Teradata data-warehouse systems.
- If you combine all its competitors’ data, the one which Teradata supports is much more than that.
- By using Teradata database, the data size can be increased from 100 gigabytes to over 100 petabytes. This can be done without losing performance. This unique feature is termed as Scalability.
- Teradata provides high data availability with no single point of failure because of its built-in fault tolerance.
- For database administration, Teradata manager stands as a single point of control.
- Developed and designed with parallel architecture
- Indexing schemes which are complicated or reorganizations which eat time can be eliminated through automatic and even data distribution.
Teradata database also includes various technologies and products in it. Some of them are listed below.
- Active data warehouse
- Aster platform
- Backup, Archive and Restore (BAR)
- Data marts
- Enterprise data warehouse
Features of Teradata
Every time Teradata releases an updated version, it comes up with some exciting features which include:
Teradata Query Grid:
It is a feature of the Teradata database which allows the user of the database to obtain data from databases external to Teradata from SQL queries which are standard ones. As Teradata is built on parallel architecture, movement of data happens in parallel whenever there is a possibility. In the latest version of Teradata, Teradata 15.0, the Teradata database is now able to connect Hadoop with this query grid. So, it is termed as Teradata-to-Hadoop connector.
XML Datatype:
This is a datatype provided by Teradata database which processes and stores the XML data. For operations like parsing, transformations, query, XML datatype supports functions, stored procedures, methods.
JavaScript Object Notation (JSON):
This is a new feature to support the storage and processing of data in the Teradata database. The size of JSON documents is up to 16 MB.
Light-Weight Redistribution:
Using this feature, Teradata optimizer can switch from all-AMP row redistribution to a few AMP row redistribution. This is also termed as single sender redistribution.
Conclusion
When I searched for Teradata Training programs, I have found a series of them. There are so many groups on Teradata which includes dedicated certification teams, premier subject matter experts, Teradata education teams and so on. As data analytics is used in big businesses, job opportunities in Teradata are growing rapidly because data analytics is a major part of Teradata. When I enquired about salaries for personnel who choose Teradata as their career, I found that salaries for software engineers with expertise in Teradata are 30% higher when compared with a typical software engineer. As high importance is given to Teradata in the data-warehousing industry, choosing Teradata as a career can be a good career option.