Analytics in the Cloud without Reinventing the Wheel
March 29, 2018
Analytics in the Cloud without Reinventing the Wheel
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Teradata Enterprise Data Warehousing
I was recently involved in a top 500 company cloud migration to Teradata Enterprise on AWS https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/pp/B01LW1R13T. There was a need to migrate the local company owned data center to the cloud and that included the existing production Teradata Enterprise Data Warehouse and all its dependencies. This was the largest and the first MMP in the AWS cloud whereas previously the only option for Teradata in the cloud were single node options. The biggest challenge we faced was not related to Teradata but getting the network configuration tuned to satisfy the interfacing of the existing non cloud enterprise with the cloud Teradata Enterprise. This also was critical so that we could migrate nearly 100TB of data to the cloud over a single weekend.
- The Teradata Enterprise provides the best workload management bar none. There is virtually no analytic task that it can not handle. It is designed to handle mixed workloads and it shows. Tactical query related reports and applications can easily be given high priority while more processing intensive queries can be throttled and prioritized internally like a finely tuned data super highway so to prevent data traffic jams and allow the entire enterprise to be served efficiently.
- Designed to be easily maintained. Teradata requires very little maintenance compared to other enterprise DBs. Also, the integrated Viewpoint server provides a central view of the enterprise data-warehouse and supports servers. It also has convenient direct integration with DSA backups and supports analytic data labs that can be used to empower users.
- Teradata supports all the latest analytic open source languages and has advanced APIs that can be easily be leveraged within custom scripts and applications. The feature set integrated out of the box in Teradata is something few competitors can match. It also supports Map Reduce and other analytic functions natively in the database.
- The new Teradata Enterprise in the Cloud on AWS makes changing node configurations to handle increased workloads a matter of hours rather than weeks type process and rather than dealing with trying to reinvent the wheel with a new infant "open source" or "new" cloud database that is missing core features that mature databases like Teradata have supported for years as a customer you get the maturity as well the cutting edge cloud capabilities in a no-compromise solution.
- Teradata Intellicloud support provides pain-free management of the cloud environment. It handles the backups and manages EC2 instances to keep everything running smoothly.
- The Teradata Querygrid product provides a level of interoperability between itself and competitor and open sources data sources without having to design complex ETL.
- Teradata can improve by supporting more native AWS cloud features. Currently if a node goes down the EC2 instance must be restarted. It isn't something that happens frequently but more tight integration with cloud providers like AWS and Azure will allow Teradata to offer truly dynamic scaling.
- Some Teradata features are oversold before they are ready for prime-time. Teradata is not unique in this but if something is sold as an integrated product stack it should really be integrated not something that requires an extensive development cycle to be integrated at a customer's expense. If something is supported it should've really be tested and QAed thoroughly before a customer touches it.
- Moving to Teradata in the Cloud-enabled a level of agility that previously didn't exist in the organization. It also enabled a level of analytic competency that was not achievable using other options on the aggressive timeline that was required. We didn't want to settle for reinventing a wheel when we had a super tuned performance capable beast readily available in Teradata. Teradata lets us focus on our business rather than spending money and effort trying to design software or database foundations features on an open source or lower performance platform.
Teradata is the leader in Data Warehousing bar none based on independent experts like Gartner and our experience aligns with this.