Teradata 13.0 Database With Virtual Storage Capability

Teradata Corporation announced the Teradata 13.0 database, the first with breakthrough Teradata Virtual Storage capability making it economical to leverage a new class of data to support enterprise-wide strategic intelligence. In addition, Teradata Labs designed an entirely new-class of data extract, load and transform tools. This innovation offers a substantial performance improvement over the previous tools enabling faster data loading into the data warehouse.

To simplify and speed database functionality, Teradata 13.0 is packed with 75 new features for active data warehousing, providing an overall performance improvement up to 30 percent.

Teradata Virtual Storage automatically and intelligently manages data storage and retrieval. It places the most frequently used or ‘hot’ data on the fastest storage and the least used or ‘cold’ data on the slowest storage without user or administrator intervention. And, as the data’s usage changes over its lifetime, it automatically moves it to the most appropriate storage location. For example, financial services institutions can collect and analyze data for immediate business insights then archive the data to respond to compliance requests generated from regulators years later.

“Teradata is the first to market with automated virtual storage capability enabling our customers to access data when needed and at a lower cost, because data no longer needs to be moved or placed in different storage mediums outside the data warehouse—it can all be kept in the data warehouse for better business decision-making,” said Scott Gnau, chief development officer, Teradata Corporation. “This innovation will enable our customers to meet the extreme service level demands of business users.”

“Storage virtualization is a popular topic in IT organizations and vendor marketing material. Teradata has applied it within their data warehouse to balance data temperature with storage performance characteristics to provide a greater degree of storage configuration flexibility. Teradata’s unique intelligent storage management approach should allow customers to get the most out of a heterogeneous storage configuration,” Steve Thill, consulting director, APP Consulting, Inc.

For the first time, customers can mix and intelligently manage different sizes and types of disk drives within a single system. Companies can utilize larger, less expensive disk drives without sacrificing user performance. In addition, customers can add storage to prior generations of hardware. This co-existence extends the value of previous investments in Teradata technology.

Geospatial
Teradata is now able to store and process geospatial data along with other data when responding to queries. The results of the analysis can be delivered through Microsoft Excel, a business intelligence tool, or shown on a map or other visualization tool. According to Gnau, “Teradata is the first provider with high performance geospatial capabilities built into the business intelligence infrastructure, which supports operational and strategic workloads. The geospatial capability adds another data dimension for customers seeking to increase the intelligence capability of their business. With the growth of GPS and RFID systems, location data is becoming commonplace and it supports strategic and operational intelligence for which Teradata is known.”

Some of the types of business questions that can be asked include:

• How far will customers drive to buy a flat screen television on sale?
• What is the insurance claim history on properties within a flood or fire zone over multiple years?
• Where should a telecommunications company locate a new cell phone tower to enhance service based on an analysis of the location of consumer call traffic, customer service complaints about poor reception and the best topography?

Teradata Multi-System Manager
Teradata Multi-System Manager allows business users to have customizable self-service information about the status of the data and the applications on which they rely. It has an unmatched awareness or intelligence that understands which applications use which data and the status of a job. This enables users to be more productive; business users can now check system availability and application status to make decisions about their daily work. For example, if data wasn’t loaded as planned, then the user shouldn’t waste time doing an analysis or using a business application with outdated data. Rather than just knowing if the application is up, users can now see if the application has the latest data to analyze. This system management capability is automated and doesn’t require administrative intervention and users aren’t flooded with irrelevant broadcasted messages. Teradata Multi-System Manager is delivered through a new set of Teradata Viewpoint portlets, a web-based system management solution, which makes it available virtually anytime, anywhere to business users.

Enhancements to Existing Features
The enhancements in Teradata 13.0 are based on more than 100 customer requests. Some of these include: the support of powerful in-database capabilities of partners like SAS. Customers will be able to simultaneously analyze tens-of-thousands of variables directly in the database. The results of the highly complex analytics will be more refined and pinpoint trends with which business users can take action.

For customers using Online Analytical Processing (OLAP), the analysis will run up to 50 percent faster on Teradata. Teradata’s patented ‘intelligent scanning’ innovation, which eliminates the need to scan data whenever possible, has been improved, making it 20 times faster. Without specialized hardware, it automatically rewrites problem queries and routes queries on the best path to optimized execution. Finally, it is now easier to build and port business intelligence applications to the Teradata data warehouse.

Teradata 13.0 includes: Teradata Database 13.0, Teradata Tools and Utilities 13.0, and professional and consulting services accompanied by application integration and partnerships.

Teradata 13.0 supports the growing Teradata Purpose-Built Platform Family, which includes the Teradata Data Mart Appliance, the Teradata Extreme Data Appliance, the Teradata Data Warehouse Appliance and the Teradata Active Enterprise Data Warehouse.

Teradata 13.0 will be shipped in beta version in fourth quarter of 2008, with general availability in the second quarter of 2009.