Teradata

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Teradata

Teradata Corporation () is a hardware and software vendor specializing in data warehousing and analytic applications. Teradata was formerly a division of NCR Corporation, the largest company in Dayton, Ohio. Teradata's headquarters are in Miamisburg, OH. The spinoff from NCR occurred on October 1, 2007.

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 BYNET messaging fabric. Teradata systems are offered with either Teradata-branded LSI or EMC disk arrays for database storage.

Operating System Compatibility

Teradata offers a choice of several operating systems:

UNIX SVR4.2 MP-RAS, a variant of System V UNIX from AT&T
Microsoft Windows Server 2003
SUSE Linux Enterprise Server on 64-bit Intel servers.

Introduction

Teradata is a software company, founded in 1979, that develops and sells a relational database management system with the same name. Teradata is a division of the NCR Corporation, which acquired the Teradata Company on February 28, 1991. However, on January 8, 2007, NCR announced that it will spin-off Teradata as an independently traded company.

Teradata Enterprise Data Warehouses are often accessed via ODBC or JDBC 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 64 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.

Customers

Teradata currently has over 1,000 customers and over 1,900 installations of its RDBMS. The largest and most prominent customer is Wal-Mart, which runs its central inventory, enterprise reporting, and other financial systems on Teradata. Other Teradata customers include companies such as AT&T (formerly SBC), Bank of America, Best Buy, Coca Cola, Continental Airlines and FedEx.

Competition

Teradata's main competitors are other high-end solutions from vendors such as Oracle, IBM, and Sybase IQ. Recent competition has arisen from data warehouse appliance vendors such as Netezza, DATAllegro (acquired in August, 2008 by Microsoft), Greenplum and Vertica Systems. These have slowed Teradata's penetration into the mid-market and some verticals, particularly energy.

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

Between 1976 and 1979 the concept of Teradata grew out of research at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and from the discussions of Citibank’s advanced technology group. Founders worked to design a database management system for parallel processing with multiple microprocessors, specifically for decision support. Teradata was incorporated on July 13, 1979, and started in a garage in Brentwood, Calif. The name Teradata was chosen to symbolize the ability to manage terabytes (trillions of bytes) of data.

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. Teradata split from NCR and officially became Teradata Corporation (NYSE: TDC) 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. .