Does your data need a new home?
Make the move to Teradata. It's a switch made simple.
by Gary Flood
For millions of Europeans facing poor harvests, economic hardship, lack of opportunity and political oppression in the 19th century, there was only one way out. They took the risk of crossing continents and oceans in order to make a great migration West to the fast-developing United States. Indeed, between 1845 and 1860 more than 3.5 million people arrived in America in search of a better life.
There are strikingly similar parallels in the field of enterprise information technology. Environments that once seemed at least adequate—if not ideal—eventually prove too constricting and unable to guarantee long-term viability. Resources quickly end up exhausted. That means migrating from one data warehousing platform to another often becomes inevitable.
While a majority of migrations to Teradata are from Oracle, the Teradata Professional Services team has a track record of migrating IBM DB2, Informix and Sybase data warehouses and data marts to Teradata. So if you are currently using one of these other platforms, Teradata's Professional Services can provide the tools and expertise to help you migrate.
"At Teradata, we help companies get past the underlying technology platform complexities that inhibit or prevent effective evolution of the data warehouse," says Dan Higgins, director, global sales support for Teradata. "For example, we have designed, optimized and encapsulated the hardware, OS and file system. This frees customers to focus on those tasks that deliver business value, not on the care and feeding of technology."
At this point, organizations can either work with their existing platform or replace it—partially or completely—with Teradata's increased horsepower. But that means migration—a scary word that summons up /images of disruption and the start of a journey to a new and unknown place. You may decide to keep Oracle for certain operational processes while migrating your business intelligence capabilities to Teradata. "Oracle may be appropriate for highly tuned online transaction processing applications with predetermined and stable requirements but its complexity becomes overwhelming and inhibiting with enterprise data warehousing workloads," adds Higgins, who has spent more than 25 years in system and data warehouse design and architecture and in IT management with Lockheed Martin, U.S. West Communications, Boeing, TRW and Teradata.
"Oracle can't run as fast as Teradata unless you do major manual tuning and add costly hardware," says Jack Garzella, Teradata's application solutions and database conversions director. He is a former industry director with Oracle, where he led implementations for large data warehouse and online transaction processing systems. "But what happens if you want to add new business value, or if you need to handle a big expanse of data?"
Mark Shainman, formerly a senior research analyst with META Group and now a Teradata senior program manager
in charge of Oracle migrations, says,
"In most cases, within an Oracle environment, data must be highly modeled, aggregated and partitioned for the platform to have any type of performance. This limits IT organizations to only answering questions they have specifically planned to answer, and if business needs change (which they always do, now more rapidly than ever before), organizations must continually go through the arduous task of re-aggregating, re-indexing and re-partitioning."
And sometimes, he explains, the platform simply hits a scalability and performance wall, braking to a halt. "In these situations, companies have to endure the cost and pain of migration while their IT infrastructure is in a state of chaos," he says.
How can you avoid that problem? Shainman recommends migrating to a more robust platform long before hitting the proverbial wall. "The strategic choice of migrating not only has the benefit of scalability, but it also allows more manageability and flexibility—qualities that may have been impossible to experience in the previous IT environment," he says.
Easy path to follow
Those 19th-century pioneers starting new lives in the West quickly established routes to follow that were relatively danger free. But is there a similarly clear path for companies considering a migration to Teradata?
Yes. Companies have a migration option that comprises the help of not just Teradata Professional Services, training and methodology, but also proven software tools to facilitate the process. Teradata migration experts working with the company's Professional Services team have undertaken more than 120 migration projects, many of which have already seen the successful migration of users, applications and data to Teradata.
The amount of time it takes to migrate obviously depends upon individual business needs and the amount of code to be converted, but the average project runs 90–120 days. Very few run more than 10 months, and Teradata has a tool available that can estimate and automate much of the work based on specific information from the migration candidate's actual platform.
To estimate the time required to migrate from Oracle, Garzella created a tool known as Oracle 2 Teradata Estimation & Project Planning Tool. It uses specific system data from the client, such as lines of code, number of tables, number of reports and types of tools, to estimate the project size based on proven metrics from previous conversions and specific project needs. The data can then be fed into Teradata Professional Services' Teradata Solutions Methodology with the Teradata plug-in Oracle Conversion Solution Modifier to create a detailed project plan, a resource plan and the required documentation. The tool has specific steps for an Oracle conversion, but it may also include data mart consolidation or an integrated enterprise logical data model.
Easy benefits to reap
In these days of tight budgets, it's reassuring to know there is clear ROI to be found in a Teradata migration. Key metrics from past conversions show that code line counts can be cut by 20% to 50%, reducing maintenance costs and simplifying system administration. The number of steps in many processes is slashed too, by up to 70% in the best cases, but at least by 20%, improving system performance. Load time is also radically slimmed, from 20% to 50% on average, while data extraction, transformation and loading are streamlined by 20% to 70%.
Overall, a simplified data warehouse will mean less money spent on overhead because the new system requires fewer steps and less maintenance. And because of the inherent power of the Teradata engine, migrated environments are seeing an average of 20% to 60% performance improvement, according to customers who have provided Teradata with before and after figures.
Easy choice to make
Why migrate? And why Teradata?
"Customers migrate when they've run out of capacity or their current system can't scale to match the growth they want and to get more value from their data warehouse," notes Danny Maddox, senior data warehousing consultant in Teradata's national accounts division. Teradata is more than just a fix since it also brings value to the business, not just a database, he says.
Maddox has helped with two big migration projects recently where a transportation company and a financial services giant successfully migrated their data warehouses of 3TB and 10TB, respectively, to the Teradata environment.
Running out of elbowroom isn't the only reason to migrate, of course. "Customers may have stability problems with their existing environment and high maintenance costs—or they could be having trouble with the management and running of simultaneous workloads," Garzella says. "There can also be a motivation to simplify and consolidate their architectures; we're seeing a lot of interest in bringing together disparate data marts, for instance."
Given that Teradata now offers a proven methodology and automated support with a growing set of tools, it's difficult to see why any customer facing constraints, operating inefficiencies or needless complexities in their data warehousing environment would not investigate migration.
"Lots of people don't even believe it's possible to do," says George Coleman, senior consultant, Teradata Partners Engineering. "But we've shown that any database and process, no matter how complicated, really can be ported to the Teradata environment. You really can move from that sequential processing mindset to the Teradata parallel processing one. We can get you there."
For more on Teradata migration, go to Teradata.com and search using the keyword "migration." T
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Migration to the power of three
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The Teradata migration team sees three main types of migration projects. Which description fits your need?
Forklift (one-to-one migration)—A straight port from another database with the same data model and applications, but with more power under the hood. These are the quickest and least complex migrations, often completing in three to six months.
Redesign—When existing applications need to be redesigned to take advantage of the added functionality of the Teradata environment. But wherever possible, existing code bases will be ported to the new environment and extended, rather than rewritten from scratch.
Evolutionary—Breaks migration process into smaller chunks, some of which may be straight forklifts, while later stages may involve more ambitious redesign work. This is a typical approach for a data mart consolidation project, for instance.
Do you have total cost of ownership issues? A straight forklift can solve your problem. Do you need a single view of the business? Redesign or evolution may help. Are you mainly concerned with performance? A combination of all types of migration projects may address this. The type of migration project you need depends on the real underlying problem. Contact a Teradata representative who can help determine the right option for your circumstances.
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What's in the toolbox?
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Teradata's migration team has a comprehensive set of tools to help customers make the change to Teradata. These tools are in the armory of the Teradata Professional Services teams that provide hands-on assistance. They have been built or imported from real-world experience, often coming out of specific migration projects,
and therefore have proven track records.
Planning—Teradata's Estimation and Project Planning Tool
offers project managers a spreadsheet approach for Oracle and DB2 conversion estimations, and the Teradata Solutions Methodology for building or migrating your data warehouse.
Performing—A schema and data conversion tool changes the
original database schema into a form Teradata can work with. Also,
it is able to create special scripts to move the data either through named pipes or flat files, and it can be run from the popular ERwin data-modeling tool.
Supporting—A code converter, the Automated Application Migration Tool, simplifies the translation from Oracle SQL and PL/SQL to Teradata SQL. It complements the schema and data
conversion tool.
Sustaining—In addition, with Teradata Database V2R5.1, Professional Services can install Teradata SQL functions that duplicate many of the built-in SQL functions previously available only in Oracle or DB2.
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Gary Flood has written about the software industry for a number of publications, including the U.K. arm of Information Week, where he was features editor.
© Teradata Magazine-June 2004
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