What is Teradata?

What is Teradata?

Teradata is one of the relational database management systems and is used for building large-scale data warehousing applications. This tool provides support to multiple data warehouse operations at the same time to different clients and this is achieved through the concept called parallelism. It is completely scalable and is an open system.

It is introduced in 1979 and it has slowly evolved into a great system. The current version of Teradata is 15.0

Features of Teradata:

• Unlimited Parallelism: Teradata is based on MPP architecture (Massively Parallel Processing) which divides the workload evenly across the entire system. It splits the task among its processes and runs them parallelly and this reduces the pressure and task is completed real quick.
• Connectivity: Teradata can connect to mainframe or network attached systems. It supports SQL to interact with data stored in the tables. Also, It provides its own extension.
• Mature Optimizer: Teradata optimizer is very matured and works parallelly since the start.
• Linear Scalability: Teradata systems are extremely scalable. They are scalable up to 2048 nodes. One can easily triple the capacity of the system by tripling the number of AMPs.
• Robust Utilities: Teradata supports robust utilities to import/export data Eg: Fast Load, Multi-load, etc..
• Shared Nothing Architecture: Teradata nodes, AMPs work independently without sharing. They work independently.
• Useful for any type of user: It can be customized for any type of users like business users or application users. The SQL of Teradata can be customized for business needs and provides great features for business requirements.

Components

The major components of Teradata are Parsing Engine, ByNet, and Access Module, Processors. Below are the key components of the system:

• Node:

Every individual server in Teradata is called a node. Every node has its own operating system, memory, CPU, disk space and its own copy of Teradata RDBMS. A cabinet of a Teradata would contain the number of nodes.

• Parsing Engine:

Parsing Engine is used for getting queries from the client and to prepare a clear execution plan. The parsing engine responsibilities are:

1. Receiving SQL Query from the client
2. Parse the received query into the system and check for any syntactical errors
3. Check if the user has required privileges for objects used in the query.
4. Prepare a neat execution plan, get the query and pass the SQL query to BYNET.
5. To receive the results from AMP and send them to the client

• Message Parsing layer:

This is BYNET and is the networking layer of the Teradata system. It is used for communication between nodes, between PE and AMP.

• Access Module Processor:

AMPs are also called as virtual processors. These are the ones that actually stores the data and retrieves the data.

• Storage Architecture:

Let’s look at how storage processing takes place in the system.

When client inputs query to insert records, records are sent to BYNET by the parsing engine. BYNET retrieves the records now and sends the rows to target AMPs. AMPs stores the records on the disk.

The process of Retrieval:

When a client runs the queries to get the records, first, parsing engine sends a request to BYNET. BYNET sends the request to respective AMPs. AMPs would then search their disks in parallel and identifies the required record and sends it to BYNET. BYNET would then send the records to parsing engine which again would send them to the client and complete it.

When to opt:

When we need a highly scalable, high performance oriented and massively parallel data warehousing system, we chose Teradata.

It is not required to go for Teradata if the requirement is simply data exploration, loading data from multiple scenarios, etc… 

Teradata Security:

It offers a high level of security like it provides system level and user level password protection, row and column level security, user authentication.

What do you need to know if you want to use Teradata and make it a career option?

It is RDBMS which is DBMS software that helps to interact with data tables using SQL. Definitely knowledge of DB like SQL querying or any DB languages can help you to switch to the Teradata usage. However, one needs to be highly creative to become a Teradata professional and be logically capable of writing queries that are scalable and optimum

However, the career options for a Teradata engineer are quite a few as most of the companies implement Teradata for only large-scale applications.

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