DAYTON, Ohio –
Teradata, a division of
NCR Corporation (NYSE: NCR), announced today the availability of Teradata® Warehouse 8.2, a suite of software, hardware and consulting services, that builds on capabilities to infuse real-time intelligence into front-line operations, customer service and strategic planning supporting both strategic decision-making and thousands of daily operational tasks.
The technical enhancements built into Teradata Warehouse 8.2 expand its ability to deliver real-time intelligence. These unique capabilities offer fast performance, a significant volume of concurrent queries, high-system availability, event monitoring, easy integration into the enterprise, simplified system management, and unparalleled support of short operational as well as long strategic workloads.
"A major analyst firm recently reported that Teradata is the clear leader ahead of all competitors, including the late-to-market appliance vendors. To maintain this leadership, Teradata is dedicated to listening and making improvements to ensure its technology meets the ever-changing needs of our valued customers," said Scott Gnau, vice president and general manager of Teradata research and development. "In addition to supporting our strategic mission for delivery of real-time enterprise intelligence, Teradata has incorporated 44 enhancements and new features into Teradata Warehouse 8.2. We are committed to continue providing the most innovative data warehousing solution in the world."
Teradata Warehouse 8.2 incorporates key product refinements identified by industry-leading customers that rely on their active data warehouse. These active data warehouses, deployed across many industries, have led to enhancements that reduce the cost and effort for implementation and increase the predictability of the mixed workloads, both short-term operational and long-term strategic queries.
For example, a Teradata financial services customer with an active data warehouse was able to evaluate consumer transactions across all channels to better understand its customer's needs. Selected transactions triggered messages to be sent to branch managers or telephone customer service representatives with recommendations for customized product offers, resulting in a marked improvement in sales.
The enhancements incorporated into Teradata Warehouse 8.2 have boosted the speed and predictability of high-frequency queries from applications that support front-line customer representatives. One enhancement now enables Teradata to create partitions in join indexes. The partitions act as alphabetical tabs in a notebook allowing the database to look only in the relevant section and eliminating the need to scan tens of millions of rows in the join index, responding to the query faster as a result. Join indexes, which combine data from multiple tables, are often created to speed the performance of high-volume queries from front-line applications.
If an application combines the information from two tables to display information about a customer calling a call center, a join index can eliminate the processing to combine the data during each query. This is important because table sizes are continuously growing with the storage of more data. As tables grow, the new ability to expand the use of partitioning allows the query to continue to meet performance requirements without adding additional processing power to the system.
For example, if a call center application always combines information from two tables to display customer information, a performance improvement technique is to create a join index to eliminate the processing to combine the data during each query. If this customer information is revenue-related, the join index can then also be partitioned so that a query looking for this month's revenue versus this month three years ago will query two months versus the entire 36 months of history. Consequently, this query would roughly take about 5 percent of the time, providing a dramatic performance improvement.
Teradata has also enhanced the flexibility of using join indexes along with database triggers to further improve query performance, which is especially important for time-sensitive front-line workloads. Triggers monitor specific business activity and can initiate various activities when a predefined event occurs, and are commonly used when real-time notification of an event is critical to the business.
To further enhance the ability of the Teradata data warehouse to integrate within the enterprise, Teradata has adopted Microsoft.Net architecture with the release of the .Net Data Provider and has also released the 64-bit Open Data Base Connectivity driver. These data connectivity utilities create a bridge between Teradata and applications. In addition, Teradata has developed an interface for its data-loading utilities for Java Message Service, an industry standard enterprise messaging system, which expands the ability to access disparate data sources within or outside the enterprise.
Teradata partners with leading software vendors, such as Business Objects, to offer powerful data warehousing solutions to customers. "Teradata and Business Objects are at the forefront of the market as we extend enterprise business intelligence throughout customers' organizations, helping customers meet the challenges posed by today's competitive environment," said Robert Davis, vice president of product management at Business Objects. "Through our partnership with Teradata, our joint customers can gain valuable insight into their business, improving decision-making and enterprise performance."
These initial partners are testing their software for compatibility with Teradata Warehouse 8.2: Ab Initio, Atanasoft, BEZ Systems, Business Objects, GoldenGate Software, IBM IIS, Informatica Corporation, KXEN, MicroStrategy, Protegrity Corporation, Sunopsis Inc., and Ward Analytics Limited.
Available for sale now, and installation later this year, the key components of Teradata Warehouse 8.2 include the flagship Teradata Database V2R6.2, Teradata Tools and Utilities 8.2, and the NCR 5450 Server that was introduced in early 2006. These components are accompanied by Teradata consulting services, applications and partnerships.
About Teradata Division
Teradata,
(www.teradata.com)
a division of NCR Corporation (NYSE: NCR), is the global technology leader in enterprise data warehousing, analytic applications and data warehousing services. Organizations around the world rely on the power of Teradata’s award-winning solutions to get a single, integrated view of their business to enhance decision-making, customer relationships and profitability.
About NCR Corporation
NCR Corporation (NYSE: NCR) is a leading global technology company helping businesses build stronger relationships with their customers. NCR’s Teradata® data warehouses, ATMs, retail systems, self-service solutions and IT services provide Relationship Technology™ that maximizes the value of customer interactions and helps organizations create a stronger competitive position. Based in Dayton, Ohio, NCR
(www.ncr.com) employs approximately 29,300 people worldwide.
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NCR and Teradata are trademarks or registered trademarks of NCR Corporation in the United States and other countries.
