Introduction
Teradata is a software company, founded in 1979, that develops and sells a relational database management system (RDBMS) with the same name. Teradata was a division of the NCR Corporation, which acquired the Teradata Company on February 28, 1991. Teradata's revenues in 2005 were almost $1.5 billion with an operating margin of 21%. On January 8, 2007, NCR announced that it would spin-off Teradata as an independently traded company, and this spin-off was completed October 1 of the same year, with Teradata trading under the NYSE stock symbol TDC.Teradata Enterprise Data Warehouses are often accessed via ODBC, JDBC or via native support by applications running on operating systems such as Microsoft Windows or flavors of UNIX. The warehouse typically sources data from operational systems via a combination of batch and trickle loads.
Teradata acts as a single data store that can accept large numbers of concurrent requests from multiple client applications. Significant features include:
- Unconditional parallelism, with load distribution shared among several servers.
- Complex ad hoc queries with up to 256 joins.
- Parallel efficiency, such that the effort for creating 100 records is same as that for creating 100,000 records.
- Scalability, so that increasing of the number of processors of an existing system linearly increases the performance. Performance thus does not deteriorate with an increased number of users.
Technology
Teradata is a massively parallel processing system running a shared nothing architecture. The Teradata DBMS is linearly and predictably scalable in all dimensions of a database system workload (data volume, breadth, number of users, complexity of queries). The scalability explains its popularity for enterprise data warehousing applications. Teradata is offered on Intel servers interconnected by the proprietary BYNET messaging fabric. Teradata systems are offered with either Teradata-branded LSI or EMC disk arrays for database storage.In October 2009, CIOZone reported that Teradata would begin using solid state devices (SSD) in a new product to be released in 2010 called the Teradata Extreme Performance Appliance. The data appliance holds about 20TB stored on racks of 300GB solid state drives. The SSDs can produce performance that is 150 times faster than a hard disk drive (HDD).[7] The new appliance can scale from 7TB to 200TB and like other Teradata products, uses Intel's multi-core processors and 64-bit Linux SLES 10 operating system. Because they have no moving parts, SSDs eliminate the risk of mechanical failure that HDDs present and are 50 percent more energy efficient than hard disks. The appliance will take up about seven percent of the data center floor space that a similar data warehouse would require with traditional drives.
Operating system compatibility
Teradata offers a choice of two operating systems as mentioned below:Customers and partnerships
Teradata currently has over 1,000 customers and over 2,500 installations of its RDBMS. One of the largest and most prominent customers are in retail domain like Wal-Mart, Tesco and SUPERVALU Inc, which run their central inventory, enterprise reporting, category planning and other financial systems on Teradata. Other Teradata customers include companies such as AT&T (formerly SBC), Royal Bank of Canada, Dell, Morgan Stanley, Wells Fargo, Bank of America, Coca Cola, Macy's, FedEx and the Commonwealth Bank of Australia, and Teradata also shares over 200 joint customers with MicroStrategy, including Hudson's Bay Company, Metro Group, and the USPS.[9][10]Teradata holds an annual user group conference and expo known as Teradata PARTNERS with keynote industry speakers, educational sessions led by customers and other vendors, and presentations from BI and analytics vendors.
Teradata University Network
The Teradata University Network (TUN) is a web portal and educational resource for database, data warehousing, business intelligence and decision support systems. It is provided to lecturers, students, and other faculty free of charge. The goal of the TUN is to build a collaborative IT education community at the undergraduate and graduate levels.MicroStrategy, the founding business intelligence partner in the Teradata University Network, allows students and instructors to use its business intelligence software through the TUN. Additionally, MicroStrategy hosts a Teradata server in its in-house laboratory to test software compatibility with Teradata's new releases, creating an integrated technology partnership. Other partners in the Teradata University Network are KXEN, Planners Lab, Tableau, and the Sam M. Walton College of Business at the University of Arkansas.
[edit] Competition
Teradata's main competitors are other high-end solutions from vendors such as Oracle, IBM, and Sybase IQ which is based on a massively parallel/shared nothing architecture. Recent competition has arisen from data warehouse appliance vendors such as Netezza (IBM is set to acquire Netezza), DATAllegro (acquired in August, 2008 by Microsoft), Aster Data Systems (Teradata bought an 11 % stake in Aster Data Systems in September 2010, and agreed to pay additional $263m to take a full ownership in March 2011), ParAccel, Greenplum (acquired in July 2010 by EMC), and Vertica Systems (acquired in Feb 2011 by HP), and from packaged data warehouse applications such as SAP and Kalido. These have slowed Teradata's penetration into the mid-market and some verticals, particularly energy. Kickfire, once a competitor, was acquired by Teradata in August 2010.Recognition
Teradata database software is well regarded by industry analysts based on their independent verification of performance against a broad range of competitors. Independent analyst firm Forrester Research in 2009 issued a report, "The Forrester Wave: Enterprise Data Warehouse Platform," by James Kobielus, rating Teradata the industry's number one enterprise data warehouse platform in the "Current Offering" category. Forrester awarded the company perfect scores in 11 categories, including "Professional Services," "Corporate Direction" and "Product Direction."Gartner Group (NYSE:IT), an information technology research and advisory company, did an analysis of how certain vendors measure against criteria for that marketplace and placed Teradata in the "leaders quadrant" in its 2009 "Magic Quadrant for Data Warehouse Database Management Systems". The report, issued in 2010, ranked Teradata as number one, ahead of competitors Oracle and IBM.
In 2010, Teradata was listed in Fortune’s annual list of Most Admired Companies.
History
Teradata was founded in 1979 by:- Dr. Jack E. Shemer, President and Chairman of the Board.
- Dr. Philip M. Neches, Vice President and Chief Scientist
- Walter E. Muir, Vice President of Marketing
- Jerold R. Modes, Vice President and Chief Financial Officer
- William P. Worth, Vice President of Manufacturing
- Carroll Reed, Vice President of Research and Development
A beta system was shipped to Wells Fargo Bank in 1983, and a production parallel RDBMS for decision support - the world's first - appeared in 1984.
FORTUNE magazine named Teradata “Product of the Year” in 1986. Over the next four years channel connections to IBM MVS and Univac OS1100 mainframes were introduced, and a Teradata system over one terabyte (a trillion bytes) went live.
In December 1991, NCR, then a division of AT&T, acquired Teradata.[citation needed] Teradata split from NCR and officially became Teradata Corporation on October 1, 2007.In 1996 a Teradata database was the world’s largest, with 11 terabytes of data, and by 1999 the database of one of Teradata’s customers was the world’s largest database in production with 130 terabytes of user data on 176 nodes.
In December 2010 Teradata acquired Aprimo for $525 Million.
On 3rd March 2011, Teradata acquired Aster Data. Teradata had acquired an 11 percent ownership interest in Aster Data in September 2010, and has agreed to pay an additional $263 million for the remaining ownership interest, net of debt and other expenses.
