ACADEMIA

Teradata Corporation today announced general availability of Teradata 13, which includes Teradata Database 13, Teradata Tools and Utilities 13, services and partnerships. It is Teradata’s most significant and advanced release in terms of new lines of code, features that drive additional capabilities, customer value and a remarkable performance boost. Already recognized as the market leader, Teradata 13 provides customers an even more affordable foundation for a wide range of business analytics, which supports both departmental and enterprise intelligence for companies of all sizes. 

"We packed Teradata 13 with 93 new innovative features achieving an overall performance improvement up to 30 percent. Teradata 13 software performance has more than doubled based on improvements in the last three years. If we consider the combination of software and hardware platform performance, Teradata 13 performance is seven times faster over that same time period," said Scott Gnau, head of development, Teradata Corporation. "This performance and capability pays big, tangible dividends for our customers by helping them to out-maneuver their competitors." 

"With Teradata 13, Teradata continues its dominance of the high end of analytic data warehousing and is now positioned to capture substantial business up and down the scalability ladder. Having long ago proven its superior total cost of ownership, Teradata now packs more in database features than any other product," said Neil Raden, founder of Hired Brains. "A data warehouse must deliver analytical muscle, not just scalable storage. Teradata 13’s ability to balance complex workloads is key to this effort. The addition of geospatial and temporal capabilities will provide Teradata customers with entirely new opportunities for business models." 

Performance
Teradata 13 provides an overall improvement up to 30 percent for query processing, with some workloads running up to 20 times faster than on the previous database version. The Teradata 13 query optimizer has been improved allowing queries to run faster and consume fewer resources. The query optimizer interprets a query and determines the most efficient way for the database to process it providing business users with a rapid response to their queries. Database administrators and application developers don’t have to be involved, because these enhancements deploy automatically.

Teradata 13, with its unique and fully-integrated workload management capabilities, now enables data to stream up to two times faster into the data warehouse. Simultaneously, tens-of-thousands of variables can be analyzed directly in the database. The high-speed data loading and analysis do not interrupt or slow each other, providing agility for business users. The loading of data at high speed has been made possible by using specialized tables to support businesses that accumulate massive data volumes like retail and financial services. 

"Teradata 13 will entice new customers because it offers significant performance, a unique set of features, and it is easy to use. The many market-leading customers in our beta testing program have already reported very positive feedback," said Jeff Carter, vice president, database engineering, Teradata Corporation. "The successful development of Teradata 13 has been made possible because of an extraordinary, dedicated team of engineers who are solely focused on making it the best solution for data warehousing. Teradata 13’s features, performance enhancements and integration are focused on one thing, data warehousing."

Geospatial Data
According to Gnau, "Teradata customers will be able to dramatically improve the processing of selected geospatial queries by as much as 20 times by integrating and analyzing geospatial or location data along with customer and operational data in-database. Geospatial processing is the latest process that is executed in parallel inside the Teradata Database along with in-database OLAP (On-Line Analytical Processing) and in-database data mining with SAS. The integrated geospatial data and the high performance of Teradata Database will add a significant new data dimension for customers seeking to increase the intelligence of their enterprise."

Before the integration of location data in the warehouse, many businesses performed
analyses on geospatial data in a separate data mart, which severely limited the scope, timeliness and depth of the analysis. The Teradata 13 in-database processing is scalable and fast because it is integrated with enterprise data. Teradata customers can answer business questions, which previously couldn’t be answered. Examples of the types of questions include:

• How far will customers of various demographic segments who have purchased over $200 in the store over the past three months drive to take advantage of promotions?
• Are a company’s most profitable cell phone customers likely to defect to the competition because they are experiencing reception problems in clustered geographic areas?
• Can an insurance provider improve risk management by evaluating the rates charged to consumers for property and casualty coverage who were in the path of previous storms and might be in the path of future storms?

For customers using OLAP for standard business analytic queries, some type of queries will run up to 20 times faster on Teradata 13. The Teradata Database patented “intelligent scanning” innovation, eliminates the need to scan data whenever possible, unlike some vendors that focus on brute force, which wastes resources by unnecessarily scanning rows and rows of data.

As a part of its data warehouse solution, Teradata partners with leading software vendors to serve its customers. These partners have tested and will support Teradata 13: Ab Initio
Atanasoft, BIS², CA, Embarcadero Technologies, GoldenGate Software, Informatica, KXEN, MicroStrategy, Oracle, Protegrity, SAS, Scorecard Systems, Syncsort, Tableau Software
Talend, Trillium Software-a business of Harte-Hanks, Ward Analytics, Wherescape, and
WisdomForce.  

Teradata 13 is the foundation that powers the industry’s only "purpose-built" data warehouse platform family, which includes the Teradata Active Enterprise Data Warehouse platform, the Data Warehouse Appliance, Extreme Data Appliance, Data Mart Appliance and the Data Mart Edition.

 According to Gnau, "Customers who previously thought Teradata technology was only for large customers can now experience the power and performance of the affordable industry-leading Teradata 13."