SCIENCE

Teradata Corporation has announced general availability of the Teradata Database 13.10 providing new powerful analytic features to support leading edge customers working with complex big data and further advancing Teradata's strategic data warehousing architecture and vision. The innovative capabilities built into this new release will help customers get ahead of their businesses' analytic needs.

"Teradata Database 13.10 is built to be the centerpiece of enterprise analytics and high performance computing. We have extended our traditional lead with unique new features like automatic temporal analytics, extended compression capabilities and launched the Teradata Open Parallel Framework, for scalable big data analytics," said Scott Gnau, chief development officer, Teradata Corporation. "These innovative features extend our data warehouse services portfolio, Teradata Accelerated Analytics."

Businesses often overwrite critical pieces of historical data related to customer behavior and market conditions. Teradata's time-aware, temporal capability empowers customers to capture and track changes in the history of evolving business data, which creates a full picture of the company's business. Analyzing the data based on changes in the history rather than just the most current updates reveals a true, complete picture at any specific point in time. In doing so, companies gain greater visibility into data while reducing expensive implementation time and custom reports. In addition to temporal capabilities, other powerful features include:

• Advanced and flexible data compression options that provide as much as 20 times more data with the flexibility to use the optimal compression mechanism for specific data types. They enable businesses to economically respond to the growing thirst for data and big data applications.
• New analytic functions and expanded capabilities within the Teradata Open Parallel Framework improve precision analysis and application performance.
• Customer driven innovation such as making Teradata Viewpoint the single, web-based portal for managing Teradata systems, queries, and workloads. These innovations support leading-edge customers and their diverse and complex workload demands.

"The ability to query temporal data is an innovative capability important for data warehousing," said Mark Madsen, president of Third Nature. "The advanced nature of Teradata's temporal features and the non-intrusive way they can be added to applications puts the database far ahead of competitors in this space."

First Time-Aware Database

The Teradata Database 13.10 is the first to deliver intelligent temporal analytics making it easier for customers to create a historical picture of enterprise business transactions and activities. In doing so, companies now have the power to efficiently run queries, and analyze and manage data about how markets and conditions have changed or how they looked at any point in time. Business is highly dynamic, and temporal analytics helps customers discover deeper insights and patterns about the business.  

"Including temporal logic in our applications has been a continuous challenge. The built-in temporal capability in Teradata Database 13.10 provides reduced complexity in our SQL and is executed with fewer full table scans than our existing temporal application. Built-in temporal capability will add value for our users and speed application development," said Ralf Hausmann, senior department manager, MGI METRO Group, Information Technology GmbH.

Automated temporal data management eliminates the need to manually manage and update effective or validity dates each time the data is modified, loaded or updated. The Teradata Database automatically executes the complex modifications and inserts the required data to maintain a complete change history when a user submits a simple update command. In addition, temporal intelligence is built into the Teradata Optimizer, meaning users are not required to use complex SQL, or structured query language, to get answers to their time-based business questions. Automated data management and simplified queries reduce data errors, simplify application development, and open temporal data analysis up to business users. Temporal analytics provide powerful capabilities for various types of customers requiring complex historical tracking and analysis functions. For example:

Insurance – Insurers can now easily understand which customers had policies, including those with changes made retroactively or in advance of the policy start date. When a policy is modified and a change is posted, the Teradata Database automatically captures the new information and records it with the existing original data. Insurers can easily obtain answers to questions that impact profitability, such as whether a bill was issued with the old policy terms or new terms? Was a claim initiated and improperly processed because the policy had not yet been updated? Was a compliance report produced with the correct start date?

Manufacturing – Manufacturers can now create more meaningful sales performance reports using sales territory realignment history. If a group of sales people is moved from one region to an adjoining region mid-year, the sales region which lost people will appear to be underperforming and the region which got new people will appear to be a star based on sales volume versus last year. Using temporal history to report based on sales people in the region at the beginning of the year, a more meaningful picture of how well the sales teams grew the business emerges.

Retail – Retailers can now perform consistent year-over-year sales comparisons even as products are moved from one category to another. Teradata tracks not just transactions over time, but how data and the business change and evolve over time. For example, if a retailer moves ice cream from the frozen food category to the desserts category, databases without temporal support update the category information to "desserts," forever losing the history that ice cream used to be in the frozen food category. These small omissions can ultimately lead to incorrect results. If a category manager runs a report analyzing frozen food sales this year versus last year, the report would only capture products currently in frozen foods. Since the ice cream is no longer in frozen foods, the report run today will show lower sales for prior year than reports which were run last year prior to the re-classification. This can produce a misleading picture of business sales and potentially lead to poor strategy decisions.

Advanced Data Compression Capabilities

The Teradata Database 13.10 has enhanced compression technologies enabling customers to store more data with the flexibility to use the best compression mechanism for their situation. Data warehouses have evolved into mission-critical corporate resources and the volume and type of data that requires analysis has exploded. Teradata compression delivers a significant storage savings with up to 20 times compression for select data types and up to 4 times overall compression.

Block Level Compression provides a powerful compression technique, which operates at the data storage block level to deliver customers dramatic space savings. Algorithmic Compression is a column compression technique which allows the customer to select a compression algorithm matched to the data characteristics for superior results. Teradata Database includes three compression algorithms designed for common data. In addition, customers can also install their own algorithms matching their company- or industry-specific data.

The Teradata Database 13.10 also includes enhancements to Multi-Value Compression (MVC). MVC uses virtually no central processing unit resources for compression and decompression, and improves performance through reduced I/O as well as saving storage space. These valuable compression technologies are included with each Teradata Database license to deliver both the flexibility and the power of advanced compression capabilities to all Teradata customers.

Teradata Open Parallel Framework

Teradata has made industry-leading strides by optimizing and advancing its already extensible architecture. Teradata Open Parallel Framework, a high-performance in-database framework, enables the rapid addition of new embedded services designed to support complex parallel analytics. Teradata Database 13.10 builds on this extensible framework with additional embedded services functions to power enhanced SAS analytics, more precise geospatial processing, advanced web activity encoding and improved compatibility with other databases to make it easier for the many customers migrating from other vendors to Teradata.

Customer Driven Innovation

Teradata's innovative new temporal and compression capabilities in concert with ease of use, performance and enterprise fit enhancements further extend its lead in the data warehouse arena. Teradata Viewpoint is now the single web-based portal for managing Teradata systems, queries, and workloads, enhancing ease of use. For performance improvements, Teradata focused on its Optimizer. Performance of queries that use character fields can now be significantly improved through the partitioned primary index. This allows the optimizer to intelligently eliminate scanning of all data and only scan the most relevant data. For example, when analyzing insurance policies issued in the state of California, the optimizer will eliminate all rows in a table except those with the state code 'CA' indicating California. This capability can improve scan performance between five times and 100 times over scanning the entire table. Enterprise fit is enhanced by the extended communications server, which provides lower cost and greater flexibility when integrating with remote mainframe computers.

The Teradata Database 13.10 is the high performing analytical engine that powers all of the company's "purpose-built" platform members: Teradata  Active Enterprise Data Warehouse, the Data Warehouse Appliance, Extreme Performance Appliance, Extreme Data Appliance, and the Data Mart Appliance. In addition to the five members of the Teradata Purpose-Built Platform family, Teradata Database 13.10 is also available as the software only Data Mart Edition and Teradata Express for cloud computing solutions.

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 13.10: Ab Initio; Atanasoft; BEZ Systems, Inc.; BIS2; IBM: InfoSphere Information Server, InfoSphere Change Data Capture, InfoSphere Optim, InfoSphere Guardium, and IBM Cognos Business Intelligence (validation testing completed and will support within 90 days of final release); Informatica; KXEN; MicroStrategy; OPNET Technologies, Inc.; Oracle: Oracle Business Intelligence Foundation Suite, Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition, Oracle Essbase, Oracle GoldenGate, and Oracle Data Integrator Enterprise Edition; Protegrity; SAP; SAS; Speed-Trap; Syncsort; Ward Analytics; Wherescape; and WisdomForce Technologies.