Teradata : Introduction

What is Teradata?

Teradata is one of the most popular Relational Database Management Systems. It is mainly suitable for building large scale data warehousing applications. Teradata achieves this by the concept of parallelism. It is developed by the company called Teradata.

History of Teradata

Following is a quick summary of the history of Teradata, listing major milestones.

• 1979− Teradata was incorporated.
• 1984− The first database computer DBC/1012 was released.
• 1986− Fortune magazine named Teradata as ‘Product of the Year’.
• 1999− Largest database in the world was built using Teradata with 130 Terabytes.
• 2002− Teradata V2R5 released with Partition Primary Index and compression.
• 2006− Teradata Master Data Management solution was launched.
• 2008− Teradata 13.0 was released with Active Data Warehousing.
• 2011− Acquired Teradata Aster and entered into Advanced Analytics Space.
• 2012− Teradata 14.0 introduced.
• 2014− Teradata 15.0 introduced.

Features of Teradata

Following are some of the features of Teradata −

• Unlimited Parallelism− Teradata database system is based on Massively Parallel Processing (MPP) Architecture. MPP architecture divides the workload evenly across the entire system. Teradata system splits the task among its processes and runs them in parallel to ensure that the task is completed quickly.
• Shared Nothing Architecture− Teradata’s architecture is called as Shared Nothing Architecture. Teradata Nodes, its Access Module Processors (AMPs) and the disks associated with AMPs work independently. They are not shared with others.
• Linear Scalability− Teradata systems are highly scalable. They can scale up to 2048 Nodes. For example, you can double the capacity of the system by doubling the number of AMPs.
• Connectivity− Teradata can connect to Channel-attached systems such as Mainframe or Network-attached systems.
• Mature Optimizer− Teradata optimizer is one of the matured optimizer in the market. It has been designed to be parallel since its beginning. It has been refined for each release.
• SQL− Teradata supports industry standard SQL to interact with the data stored in tables. In addition to this, it provides its own extension.
• Robust Utilities− Teradata provides robust utilities to import/export data from/to Teradata system such as FastLoad, MultiLoad, FastExport and TPT.
• Automatic Distribution− Teradata automatically distributes the data evenly to the disks without any manual intervention.