What is Teradata? What is Importance of Teradata in Big Data?

So far, we discussed many basic matters around Big Data and Data Analytics, Big Data software solutions which are available under the hood of Apache Foundation and services offered by companies like IBM. In Big Data field we often hear the phrase Teradata. What is Teradata? What is Importance of Teradata in Big Data? This article will discuss the basics around Teradata. Teradata is a relational database management system whose idea took birth around ’70s.

What is Teradata?

Teradata Corporation is an America software company established in 1979 in California, who provides database-related products and also offer services. The company is an independent public company now. Teradata actually had 3 types of services for the customers, first is cloud and hardware-based data warehousing, second is business analytics, and third is consulting services. The Big Data movement made the company acquire a company named Aster Data Systems who had solutions for MapReduce and semi-structured data. Teradata is competitor of companies and F/OSS software of similar types from vendors such as IBM, Oracle, Microsoft, SAP, and Apache distributions.

Teradata is a Relational Database Management System suitable for building data warehousing applications. Teradata provides Teradata express for VMWare virtual machine which provides up to 1 terabyte of storage. The focus of the Teradata platform is to help the companies organize their analytical capabilities to consolidate their core business objectives.

There is Teradata Tools and Utilities (TTU) which is a collection of Teradata Client tools for server operating systems like GNU/ Linux and includes load & unload utilities, connectivity drivers and so on to connect to Teradata Database instance.

Teradata database system has following components :

1. Call level interface (CLI)
2. WinCLI and open database connectivity (ODBC)
3. Teradata Director Program (TDP)
4. Micro TDP

These are some of the features of Teradata :

1. Teradata database system is based on Massively Parallel Processing (MPP) Architecture.
2. Teradata’s architecture is called as Shared Nothing Architecture.
3. Teradata systems are highly scalable.
4. Teradata can connect to systems such as Mainframe or NAS.
5. Teradata supports commonly used SQL for interaction with the data stored in tables.
6. Teradata automatically distributes data to the disks without any manual work.

What is Importance of Teradata in Big Data?

Obviously the solutions offered by Teradata is for a niche of users and developers. The niche also opens up a job opportunity for the engineers and other technical employees.

Teradata developer needs to be technically sound for creating and managing complex high quality solutions around data warehousing, data analytics for managing the collated data. Teradata as company has several open source projects for the community :