Among worldwide known Business Intelligence giants, Teradata is always located in the front ranks. One of the factors responsible for Teradata's renown is company's flagship solution for Business Intelligence, Active Enterprise Data Warehouse. Being a complex platform, EDW enables its users to benefit from multipurpose real time intelligence support for decision making processes. Combining the advantages of data warehouse and database, EDW appears to be the truly universal solution.

Teradata EDW features

As the producers points out, active data warehousing helps delivering real time BI. Thereupon, decision making is even faster than ever before. Equally shorter became the time needed for providing decisive ones with what's most important - selected and analyzed data. However, the idea of usual data warehouse got developed and expanded what resulted in turning DW into a tactical decision making fundamental. Finally, both - strategic and operational - workloads are now being operated together within a single data warehouse. Ambitious goals are being well realized thank to Teradata EDW's technological advancement.

The whole platform is basically divided into singular modules. As a result, it is easy to modify each module without influencing on the rest of the platform. Such architecture helps avoiding superfluous breaks for development. Once the EDW is prepared for functioning within the largest enterprise, a lot of attention has been paid to scalability. Hence, the platform works equally well with three terabytes of data space and over fourteen petabytes. Thank to parallel processing, increasing the complexity of operations might not lengthen their duration. If followed with additional hardware "safety" components, results in significant increase of solution's reliability.

There are two configurations responsible for ensuring the flexibility - "H" model (with eight cores and up to 11,6 TB user data space provided) supports the most demanding purposes, providing the highest performance and scalability in reverse. In opposite to, there is also "C" model (four cores, maximum of 6,1 TB data space) suited to work well with previous versions and generations.

Teradata Enterprise Data Warehouse components

The most important EDW's components are as follows:

• Maximum two 2,66 Ghz Intel Xeon Quad Core 5500 processors.
• 12 MB cache for each processor
• 32-96 GB of basic memory
• Teradata BYNET 4 system interconnect
• 3-11 TB data space per node
• complete Teradata Database solution implemented
• 64-bit Novell SUSE Linux and 64-bit MS Windows Server 2003 for the environment

Teradata Enterprise Data Warehouse Weaknesses

Teradata EDW weaknesses:

• Cost: Teradata EDW is often regarded as expensive, both in terms of initial setup and ongoing maintenance. The total cost of ownership can be prohibitive for smaller organisations or those with limited budgets, especially when compared to more cost-effective cloud solutions.
• Complexity: Managing and optimising Teradata EDW can be complex, requiring specialised expertise. The platform's sophistication can lead to steep learning curves for new users and higher operational overhead for organisations.
• Scalability Limits: While Teradata EDW is scalable, it is not as flexible or elastic as modern cloud-based platforms. Scaling often requires significant planning and investment, which can slow down response times to changing business needs.
• Vendor Lock-In: Teradata EDW can lead to vendor lock-in due to its proprietary technology stack. This makes it challenging for organisations to migrate to other platforms or integrate with non-Teradata tools without incurring significant costs and effort.
• Cloud Transition: Although Teradata has made efforts to offer cloud solutions, its traditional EDW platform is inherently on-premises. As businesses increasingly move towards cloud-native architectures, Teradata EDW's on-premises nature may be seen as a disadvantage, lacking the agility and innovations offered by cloud-native competitors.
• Limited Real-Time Processing: While Teradata EDW is strong in batch processing and large-scale analytics, its capabilities in real-time data processing and streaming analytics are not as advanced as some newer platforms, potentially limiting its use in applications requiring immediate insights.

Teradata EDW resources

http://www.teradata.com/t/brochures/Teradata-Active-Enterprise-Data-Warehouse-5600/ - producer's brochure explains everything about the technical aspect of EDW 5600 platform. Once all the details are included, the brochure is divided into two parts. The first one - the description - can be considered a good introduction into Teradata Active Enterprise Data Warehouse world. Then, the second part is devoted to a table including all technical details pointed in a few words. It's a good summarization and a facilitation for further comparing EDW to other vendors' solutions.

http://www.bi-dw.info/teradata.htm - top resources related to Teradata data warehousing

http://www.dbms2.com/2009/08/24/teradatas-active-enterprise-data-warehouse-story/ - in need for from the outside opinion? This article - as they call it, a "story" - ensures another point of view on Teradata Enterprise Data Warehouse, a lot of weight attaching to the prefix "active" in platform's name. Written basing on author's personal experiences with the system, article provides a symbolic comparison to other accessible solutions. However, remember to read not only the article, but the comments posted below, as well.

http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/new-faster-teradata-active-enterprise-data-warehouse-platform-delivers-enterprise-agility-and-architecture-flexibility-86599512.html - once the newest version of Teradata EDW isn't its first release, it's worth to check out how the solution is developed and expanded. The article - based on Teradata's press content - focuses on what has changed and got improved. Supplied with numerous additional links, it's a good source of information about EDW's evolution.