Teradata Centre of Excellence

Another piece of fine marketing material has just been released by the VLDB Solutions marketing machine to publicise our 'Teradata Centre of Excellence' service offering:

http://www.vldbsolutions.com/pdf/Teradata_Centre_of_Excellence.pdf

Enjoy!

Teradata Training Courses

VLDB Solutions are delighted to announce the following Teradata training courses available from Q2 2012:

TD01 : Teradata Architecture + Teradata SQL (3 days)
TD02 : Teradata Architecture + Teradata SQL + Teradata Advanced SQL (4 days)
TD03 : Teradata Architecture + Teradata SQL + Teradata Utilities (4 days)
TD04 : Teradata Architecture + Teradata SQL + Teradata Advanced SQL + Teradata Utilities = "Teradata Bootcamp" (5 days)
TD05 : Teradata SQL for Business Users (2-3 days as required)

Training material is exclusively licensed from our good friends Steve and Eric at Cerulium corporation in the USA and is Teradata-approved.

Teradata training courses are hands-on with only the half-day "Teradata Architecture" module delivered in lecture form.

All Teradata training content can be tailored to meet your exact requirements, and is delivered by Teradata-certified experts with a minimum of 10 years hands-on Teradata expertise.

Training can be delivered on-site at a Teradata user's premises, for which a minimum number of students must attend.

Alternately, students may with to attend a public Teradata training course. Public courses allow Teradata users to send just a single student. A full timetable of public Teradata training courses will be published as soon as demand can be gauged.

Public courses will run throughout the year and alternate between the north-west (Liverpool/Manchester) and the south-east (London/M4 corridor) of the UK. Other locations will be considered according to demand.

Contact VLDB Solutions to discuss your exact Teradata training requirements and we will be delighted to tailor a package for you.

Teradata 6690 Announced

Our friends over at Teradata have just announced the new Teradata 6690:

http://www.teradata.com/News-Releases/2012/New-Teradata-Platform-Reshapes-Business-Intelligence-Industry/

I'm not convinced it will re-shape the BI industry (but what do I know), but as the first of Teradata's hybrid SSD+HDD offerings it certainly looks like a step change from the previous HDD-only offerings.

A lot will hinge on the effectiveness of the Teradata Virtual Storage (TVS) software which "automatically moves data as temperature changes ensuring alignment to the most appropriate storage location". We'll see how that copes with the abuse inflicted on it in the real-world.

Curt Monash also has a nice write-up of a chat with Teradata's Carson Schmidt here, which covers the new Teradata 6690:

http://www.dbms2.com/2012/03/09/hardware-and-components-lessons-from-teradata/#comment-289620

With any luck we'll get to kick the tyres a little on the Teradata 6690 at the upcoming Teradata Universe EMEA event next month in Dublin. See you there :-)

Gartner Magic Quadrant for Data Warehouse Database Management Systems part 2

It looks like those nice folks at Teradata have ponied up some cash so the world can read what Gartner have to say in their latest "Magic Quadrant for Data Warehouse Database Management Systems".

Thanks Teradata :-)

Gartner Magic Quadrant for Data Warehouse Database Management Systems

The annual "Gartner Magic Quadrant for Data Warehouse Database Management Systems" was published last week.

Like many folk out there, I am as interested in what the industry analysts make of the report as the report itself. Curt Monash's comments are here: http://www.dbms2.com/2012/02/08/gartner-magic-quadrant-data-warehouse-2011-2012/

The comments from Curt I picked up on are as follows...

"Teradata really needs to do is evolve to a more pick-your-own-node-combination mix-match kind of offering"

Whilst I agree with this in some respects, and it's something I have always hoped to see, Teradata has always taken the reasonable view that their 'stuff' consists of a tightly integrated stack that only they can assemble, test and certify.

It would also cause support nightmares for Teradata's GSC. At present there is just the eponymous Teradata DBMS running on top of SUSE Linux (with legacy NCR MP-RAS), Dell servers and LSI or EMC storage to support. The BYNET interconnect for MPP systems is also a potential showstopper.

I think we'll but stuck with 2 AMP Teradata VMs and software-only single node Teradata Data Mart SMP servers as the choices for running on 'non-standard' hardware for the foreseeable.

Regarding IBM, Curt states "But Gartner does mention concurrency as a strength. I agree, especially if we presume that that was a reference to DB2 rather than Netezza."

Wise words. Concurrency was an issue that Netezza struggled with in the early days, but doesn't everyone? It's a lot better than it was, no doubt. Workload management on large data warehouse systems is never easy, but it tends to improve over time as products mature.

This really made me chuckle: "in Netezza’s defense, it has had to endure IBM’s post-acquisition on-boarding process."

As a long-term Netezza partner we baulked at the "on-boarding" required to maintain this status once Netezza was gorged by IBM.

The comments relating to EMC Greenplum seem entirely fair and reasonable. The only thing I would add is that until Teradata goes down the 'mix and match' route (see above), Greenplum is likely to maintain it's status as the only 'roll-your-own' MPP play anywhere near Gartner's Data Warehouse Database Management Systems leaders quadrant.

Although the Greenplum DBMS is promoted by EMC as part of the EMC Greenplum Data Computing Appliance, it is still very much available as a software-only offering that can be deployed on a wide range of OS, server and storage choices. This we like, a lot.

Perhaps the most notable of Curt's comments relate to Microsoft:

"there isn’t a single production reference for Microsoft’s Parallel Data Warehouse".

This comes as no surprise. Despite considering ourselves well connected in the DW/BI world, and despite posting on several forums, we had been unable to confirm a single PDW deployment out in the wild.

The 40 billion row Dataupia-powered SQL Server system built by yours truly at ITIS in the UK in 2009 looks even more impressive now ;-)