In-Depth

Teradata Revamps Warehousing Suite

Version 7.1 includes an improved NCR Backup, Archive, and Restore, along with improvements to performance and availability.

• By Stephen Swoyer
• 10/01/2003

Another year, another release of a major data warehousing suite. At its PARTNERS user conference, held last week in Seattle, Teradata, a division of NCR Corp., unveiled Teradata Warehouse 7.1, a revamped version of its data warehousing hardware and software suite.

Teradata took the wraps off of Warehouse 7.0 at last year's PARTNERS conference, held in Las Vegas.

New in the suite is Teradata Dual Systems, a high-availability and performance feature that supports disaster recovery. Warehouse 7.1 also features revamped NCR Backup, Archive, and Restore (BAR) solutions, along with enhancements to Teradata Database V2R5.1 and Teradata Tools and Utilities 7.1.

Vickie Farrell, vice president of Teradata Warehouse marketing, says that with the 7.1 release, her company has sought to improve both the performance and the availability of its flagship offering. "Our customers need greater performance levels than ever before and have higher availability requirements to ensure the continuity of their business," she said in a prepared release. "As the use of active data warehousing continues to grow, Teradata Warehouse 7.1 provides customers extreme availability and performance."

Enhancements to Teradata V2R5.1—which is the database component of Teradata Warehouse—include support for user-defined functions, which allow users to create customized functions and which assists them when migrating from other database environments, along with search and retrieval report for binary and character large objects, which Teradata is a requirement for warehousing unstructured data.

Teradata says that it has developed a library of user-defined functions for many standard Oracle (and DB2) functions. The company is aggressively targeting Oracle shops in particular, as part of an effort to migrate them to Teradata.

Elsewhere in Warehouse 7.1 there’s Dual Systems capability, which is an option for Teradata’s Business Continuity Solutions component. In many traditional data warehouse high-availability architectures, a backup or redundant system sits by idling until it's needed. Teradata officials say that Dual Systems amounts to more than a mere hot standby facility because it allows a redundant system to work as part of production system, rather than standing by as an idle spare. “They can work on both the production and backup systems, with virtually no downtime," said Farrell. Customers can also locate a redundant system offsite, for disaster recovery purposes, Teradata officials say.

On the hardware side of things, NCR recently introduced and the NCR 4980 and NCR 5380 servers, which feature improved performance and support enlarged storage capacities.

Teradata Warehouse 7.1 is expected to ship by Q3 2004.