Teradata® Warehouse 8.1 Enables Enterprise Intelligence; Latest enhancements simplify system management, improve enterprise integration, and bolster privacy and security

Business Wire, Sept 19, 2005

ORLANDO, Fla. -- Teradata, a division of NCR Corporation (NYSE:NCR), announced the availability of Teradata(R) Warehouse 8.1, a suite of hardware, software and professional consulting services that makes it easier to build and manage the next generation of data warehouses that drive enterprise intelligence supporting smarter, more competitive decisions.

"With a wide range of enhancements, Teradata Warehouse 8.1 supports executives as they push beyond the boundaries of traditional business intelligence, which is typically department-specific historical reporting and analysis, to create enterprise intelligence," said Scott Gnau, vice president and general manager, Teradata research and development. "Enterprise intelligence is built on the foundation of a central warehouse that pushes valuable information into the company's operations and to front-line decision-makers in a more real-time manner. This information supports better, faster decisions because it is a combination of historical reporting and analysis, predictive analytics and near real-time customer or business activity."

The evolution of data warehouses has given rise to a new level of workload complexity. Database administrators must successfully manage a mix or a variety of queries. This mixed workload includes long-running strategic queries like the analysis of segmentation or marketing campaign results, unplanned queries, along with the entirely new class of operational or tactical queries requiring quick and consistent response times. Added to this requirement are multiple users, multiple applications, in multiple time zones, ever-increasing query traffic and the push to get answers to many business questions in near real-time. It is common for Teradata warehouses to run mission-critical applications with thousands of queries hitting the data within a 24-hour period. In spite of the workload complexity, the administrator must ensure that business users get consistent, prompt and accurate answers to their questions.

To respond to these challenges, Teradata Active System Management (TASM) has been introduced. It is a set of software system management products that enables database administrators to better understand how the system is behaving and greatly simplify its management while achieving optimal resource utilization and performance. TASM is comprised of three products: the existing Teradata Manager and Dynamic Workload Manager that have been enhanced and the newly added Teradata Workload Analyzer.

Based on the definitions set by the database administrator, TASM is able to identify types or groupings of queries from an analysis of their operating characteristics. The automated tools then monitor the query activity and provide real-time information to an on-screen dashboard display. With this intelligence, TASM can easily manage thousands of queries that are being run against the database. The workload is automatically adjusted to keep the system running smoothly with maximum performance. High-priority jobs aren't affected and the business user's needs are satisfied.

"Teradata Active System Management provides a simplified approach to the management of complex workloads with a mix of queries. It is now much easier for the administrator, and the business users will benefit from consistent responses and improved performance," said Gnau.

With new features and software solutions from strategic partners, Teradata Warehouse 8.1 has hardened its data warehouse environment to protect corporate and customer data. It has become a business imperative to ensure the privacy of personal information. Teradata and its partners support a robust set of fully integrated security features to meet ever-changing threats and its customer's security and privacy requirements. Some of the new capabilities in Teradata Warehouse 8.1 include authentication of passwords in multiple languages for multinational companies, more robust password management, sophisticated data encryption and security management.

"Security and privacy are top-of-mind issues for executives due to the impact on revenue and company reputation," said Gnau. "For security reasons, we are seeing many new prospects moving towards centralizing their data so it can be more tightly and easily managed. Teradata has a long history of helping its customers build and use their centralized, enterprise data warehouses to successfully run their businesses."

To better integrate into the enterprise, Teradata will now provide the .NET Data Provider for Teradata that is an application development and data connectivity tool for the Microsoft .NET Framework. When creating applications, software developers who are working in the Microsoft .NET Framework with Microsoft Visual Basic or Microsoft Visual C# (C Sharp) languages can easily select precoded components instead of manually coding the necessary components to build applications.

This advancement saves time and improves efficiency. "Teradata now supports the .NET Framework because more and more of our customers have adopted it. It boosts productivity and makes it faster and easier for developers to build applications that run on Teradata and provide real business value," said Gnau. "Teradata's adoption of .NET offers an additional way for Teradata to integrate into the enterprise."