Talk:Teradata

Remark

Please keep to information that is understandable by common readers. Do not use ambiguous in-house definitions of general terms like data warehouse -- this is generally denoted as an application of a DBMS, whereas someone editing this page used it in the sense of a DBMS.

What is shared nothing architecture? Define it or I will remove the sentence.

-- Nixdorf

Wal-Mart?

Actually, Wal-Mart was not Teradata's first customer. Wal-Mart bought its first Teradata system in 1989, by which time Teradata was already being used by more than 100 enterprises.

K-Mart and AT&T were among the early adopters.

Lot of companies now using Teradata for Active data warehousing.

Folks, Remove Unica from the teradata link, as it is misleading.

Customers

Teradata has many customers; however, it isn't necessary to add all of them to this article. Eight well known customers plus the Wal-Mart mention is enough. Stephenpace 22:53, 27 February 2007 (UTC)

As suggested, I've cut back the "other customers" listed to eight, and left the preceding Wal-Mart mention. Crysb (talk) 13:23, 29 September 2010 (UTC)

SAP Partnership

To be clear on this partnership, at the time the agreement was announced it essentially allowed SAP BW customers to load data from Teradata sources, but did not allow data from SAP BW to flow back to Teradata. Stephenpace 16:52, 6 February 2007 (UTC) This is clearly not true. To allow users to access the data in a more timely fashion, Teradata can be used (in conjunction with Oracle) as the DBMS for SAP BW, while SAP Open Hub Data Extract from SAP BW to Teradata allows data to flow from SAP BW into Teradata. --Jeffpankow 16:31, 30 March 2007 (UTC) You are probably much more up on this than me, so I amended my text to reflect that at the time of the announcement, it was essentially a one-way agreement. No doubt things have moved on a bit. One thing I would say is that from an outsider point of view, SAP appeared to get a lot more out of this than Teradata did. Anything short of a native port of SAP BW to Teradata (not a kludge of having to go through a non-Teradata RDBMS like Oracle) seems like a net loss for Teradata, especially since SAP is beginning to shift focus to their own BI appliance to address performance issues in another way. Also, when BW first arrived on the scene, I heard that some SAP customers were prevented by contract from wholesale moving SAP BW data to other platforms, although I've also heard some customers pushed back on that requirement so it may not be as much of an issue anymore, especially if products like SAP Open Hub Data Extract now exist and work as designed. Even then, though, having and moving data around between multiple data warehouses seems to defeat the purpose somewhat of having 'one version of the truth'. I'd rather have one Teradata warehouse (or if forced to, one SAP BW) so I didn't have to maintain two copies. Stephenpace 17:28, 30 March 2007 (UTC) As I see it, the idea of the SAP product (and Teradata for that matter) is to deliver value to the end user. It may be a bit of a kludge, but this is a way to augment a base architecture that cannot handle the desired workload. The majority of SAP customers do not require the additional power, and it is probably easier and more adventageous to SAP to divert work than it is to modify their base architecture.--Jeffpankow 21:32, 30 March 2007 (UTC)

Competition

Teradata has competition on a number of fronts, and this section needs expanding. While they pioneered this market, Teradata's historically high pricing opened the door for smaller data warehouse appliance vendors like Netezza, DATAllegro, and Calpont. On the packaged data warehouse front, software products like SAP BW and Kalido have won business and have been a primary blocker for Teradata moving into the energy vertical. And their primary competition is still custom built warehousing using other high-end database technology from IBM and Oracle. Please do not remove any one of these three areas without further discussion. Thanks. Stephenpace 16:52, 6 February 2007 (UTC) Teradata does have competition on a variety of fronts. Some of this is due to the data warehouse expansion into businesses that would not have dreamed there to be a need just a few years ago. It also has to do with Teradata being in the business of more than just Enterprise Data Warehousing (CRM and DCM in particular). My removal of SAP and Kalido previously was rooted in the fact that I have seen this particular section used as a way for companies (that had apsirations to compete in the EDW space) promote their product (aka advertising). Being that I do not believe that these two products (or Calpont) are actually competing in the same space that Teradata actually competes in, I felt it was prudent for me to delete them from the section. People traditionally buy SAP for reasons other than their BW (thus I do not see it as competition), and Kalido is a company I have never heard of (as is also the case with Calpont). Being in Houston, you probably see more of the energy sector than I do (I have traditionally operated in the retail and travel sectors) so I will give you the benefit of the doubt. --Jeffpankow 21:53, 30 March 2007 (UTC)

No need to list every data appliance vendor. Netezza and DataAllegro are the most prominent. Greenplum seems to have some endorsement by Sun and PANTA seems to have some endorsement by Oracle, but neither seems to have made a market impact yet. Removed for now. Stephenpace 12:15, 5 July 2007 (UTC) I reverted the appliance vendor section again. How many is the correct number? I don't know, but I think a good indicator is revenue by product line. Any vendor with revenue under $10 million per year is hardly competition for Teradata, IMHO. I would think that HP Neoview is likely to be a viable competitor in the future especially given their backing, but to date I haven't seen much about their customer successes yet. Stephenpace 01:30, 6 July 2007 (UTC)

I'm removing the reference to slow penetration in energy vertical, absent any reference. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 202.156.14.81 (talk) 13:16, 18 January 2009 (UTC) How about the Teradata customer page for reference: http://www.teradata.com/t/customers-industry/ . Split by vertical, energy (as of today) still isn't one which makes sense given they have few to no customers there. By contrast, energy is a huge vertical for SAP and almost every major oil company has SAP BW for at least operational reporting. Stephenpace (talk) 20:20, 12 June 2009 (UTC)

Advertising

This page reads like an advert. Tagging advertising. Saganaki- 04:42, 5 February 2007 (UTC)

No more so than similar pages on IBM and Oracle, and they aren't tagged. Duncan 17:02, 14 February 2007 (UTC)

Feel free to tag other articles you feel don't meet article standards. Stephenpace 22:53, 27 February 2007 (UTC)

The Significant features list seems a bit un-encyclopedic at best, in particular "Parallel efficiency, such that the effort for creating 100 records is same as that for creating 100,000 records." what is "effort"? this doesn't seem to match with parallelism efficiency 203.35.135.133 (talk) 01:44, 21 December 2009 (UTC)

Parts of "Recognition" seem to have an NPOV issue. The Gartner Group is and has always been closely associated with the NCR corporation, and hence, the Teradata product. Now I am not suggesting in the slightest anything illegal, immoral, underhanded or unethical. Not at all. I am not familiar at all with how Wikipedia handles such issues so I will simply raise the issue and leave it at that. Old_Wombat (talk) 08:29, 23 May 2011 (UTC)

How come no information on AT&Ts ownership?

The original AT&T owned NCR for a few disatrous years and I understand the whole Teradata product line was almost killed off. It is my understanding that it wasn't until NCR itself was spun off and needed something to sell that Teradata as a product actually took off. I don't have enough detailed understanding to make changes to the entry as such. But it is quite a story! surely someone with some detailed knowledge could add something.

Need more on their DBMS

Is their DBMS proprietary or is it add-ons atop another DBMS? Is it relational? Is it ANSI SQL compliant? Does it come with procedural language interface, etc.

cheers,

70.153.8.204 (talk) 12:05, 11 December 2007 (UTC)H. Hall

Teradata has their own relational database (e.g. it is not Oracle or DB2 under the covers). Regarding ANSI SQL compliance, from what I understand, Teradata implements a very large subset of the SQL 2003 core language standard, similar to other database vendors. Stephenpace (talk) 18:59, 10 April 2008 (UTC)

Articles on individual utilities?

The section "Teradata Utilities" is basically a list of articles on the individual utilities. Are these utilities significant/notable in and of themselves? if so, are there better sources that describe/evaluate them? Right now the articles seem to have been copied nearly verbatim from Teradata's own marketing information. If not, is there any reason for keeping the articles on the utilities? (Asking this here in hopes of finding more expert opinions.) - Jaeger5432 | Talk 21:47, 14 July 2008 (UTC)

History

I believe the list of Teradata founders is incorrect. Unfortunately, I don't see any cites for the list currently in the article so I don't know where it came from. Many sites include, verbatim, the same list -- but they may have drawn from this article.

As I recall, Carroll Reed joined the company as VP of R&D in 1982, well after the company was founded in 1979. Reed replaced Neches who had been in that role (Neches remained with the company but I don't recall what his new title became). Teradata's first annual report (1987) lists all the employees (possibly including contractors also) as of that time by order of hire and Reed's name appears well down in the list (in the #40 to #50 range).

I don't recall ever hearing that Reed was a founder in the formal sense, although it's possible that he was (such as, for example, by providing personal funding while he was still at TTI/Citicorp) and this was not widely known within the rank and file employees at Teradata.

Carroll's obituary (http://www.zirana.com/bakersfield/obituaries/obituary_robert_reed_1934_2009.html) indicates that he was "one of the original founders of Teradata Corporation", but I don't take that a definitive statement in the context that "founder" is meant in the context of this Wikipedia article.

Carroll was certainly at the company during its formative years and had a key role in its success from before first product launch through after IPO.

Unfortunately, I'm not certain enough to update the article unless/until I can find a reputable source that supports my recollection (unfortunately, this history predates the web).

WorthWhatPaid (talk) 01:43, 19 November 2009 (UTC)

Going to try to fix this page

I'm fairly new to Wikipedia, but I'm going to try making this page better by adding citations and more referenced information. Please let me know if I do something incorrect. ElaineJS (talk) 15:49, 13 December 2011 (UTC)

Can flags be removed?

I took out a lot of information that may have been perceived as biased or not notable, including a lot of stuff that was cited with only the company website. Can the flags be removed? ElaineJS (talk) 16:05, 22 December 2011 (UTC)