Teradata beefs up data warehouse

Computerworld - Business intelligence software vendor Teradata Corp. is upgrading its data warehouse product so companies can use it as a single enterprisewide data repository to support multiple analytical operations.
The company, a subsidiary of NCR Corp. in Dayton, Ohio, announced Teradata Warehouse Version 7.0 yesterday. Among the product's 150 enhancements are improved performance and a common interface for ease of use. Additionally, the new version will allow end users launching complex searches of a data warehouse to access the application at the same time as users doing more specific, smaller-scale queries, said Vickie Farrell, vice president of Teradata warehouse marketing.
That will allow customers to collapse smaller databases, also known as data marts, into a single Teradata warehouse and cut down on the cost of maintaining and synchronizing various business intelligence applications, she said.
Currently, the application permits a user to run a warehousewide, exhaustive query against historical data. Such "strategic" analytical operations might include an entire sales or marketing campaign. Version 7.0, on the other hand, will let users make more limited queries that could, for instance, be focused on one customer. It also allows current data, along with long-term historical information, to be integrated into a query.
For example, a fraud-detection application at a credit card company might in real time detect a transaction by a user and check that purchase against all other records in the database to determine if it is aberrant and indicative of potential theft, said Farrell.
Other enhancements include a load-balancing feature that can prioritize time-sensitive queries without slowing down the overall performance of the application. It can also partition chunks of related data -- such as monthly or weekly sales records -- and run queries on them on a single-server processor, which speeds performance. Normally, the data has to be distributed across processors equally, which is more time-consuming, Farrell said.
Those performance boosts sound particularly interesting to Dean Cox, manager of network planning and provision support at BellSouth Corp., an Atlanta-based telecommunications company. BellSouth currently runs a customized version R2 V5 of Teradata's warehouse, which helps it predict and avoid system outages during the network's peak usage time. Cox said the new data-joining feature will enable BellSouth to collapse historic, real-time and future predictions into a single query.
Teradata Warehouse Version 7.0 will be available in December. Pricing wasn't disclosed.