Teradata

Teradata Corporation (NYSE: TDC) is a global leader in data warehousing and analytic technologies. Teradata was formerly a division of NCR Corporation, the largest company in Dayton, Ohio. Teradata's headquarters remain in Dayton. 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 Engenio or EMC disk arrays for database storage.

Operating System Compatibility
Teradata offers a choice of several operating systems:


 * NCR UNIX SVR4 MP-RAS, a variant of System V UNIX from AT&T
 * Microsoft Windows 2000 and Windows Server 2003
 * SUSE Linux Enterprise Server on 64-bit Intel servers.

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. Wal-Mart's Teradata Data Warehouse is generally regarded by the DBS industry as being the largest data warehouse in the world. Other Teradata customers include companies such as AT&T (formerly SBC), Barclays, Dell, Continental Airlines, FedEx, Vodafone, Best Buy, T-Mobile, and USPS.

Competition
Teradata's main competitors are other high-end solutions from vendors such as Oracle, IBM, and Sybase. Recent competition has arisen from data warehouse appliance vendors such as DATAllegro, Greenplum and PANTA that use similar shared nothing architectures, and from packaged data warehouse applications such as SAP and Kalido, as well as hybrid solutions from Netezza. 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. The founders and venture capital companies bet on parallelism, relational databases, and Intel-based server clusters. At the time, all three were new, high risk technologies.

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 acquired Teradata.

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 2007	Microsoft Corporation and Teradata formed a strategic alliance. Teradata split from NCR and officially became Teradata Corporation (NYSE: TDC) on October 1, 2007.

Teradata Utilities
Teradata offers certain utilities that assists in data warehousing management and maintenance along with the Teradata RDBMS. They are
 * BTEQ
 * MultiLoad
 * FastLoad
 * FastExport
 * TPump
 * TPT (Teradata Parallel Transporter)
 * SQL Assistant / Queryman

Products

 * Customer Relationship Management
 * Data Warehousing
 * Demand Chain Management
 * Financial Management
 * Industry Solutions
 * Profitability Analytics
 * Supply Chain Intelligence
 * Master Data Management