Business intelligence software vendor Teradata is upgrading its
data warehouse product so companies can use it as an all-inclusive
data repository to support multiple analytical operations.
The company, a subsidiary of NCR, announced Teradata Warehouse
Version 7.0 on Monday. Among the product's 150 enhancements are
improved performance and a common interface for ease of use.
The latest version will also allow end users launching complex
searches of a data warehouse to access the application at the same
time as users making more specific, smaller-scale queries, said
Vickie Farrell, vice-president of Teradata warehouse marketing.
That will allow customers to collapse smaller databases, also known
as data marts, into a single Teradata warehouse and cut down on the
cost of maintaining and synchronising various business intelligence
applications, she said.
The last version of the application allowed users to run a
warehouse-wide, exhaustive query against historical data. Such
"strategic" analytical operations might include an entire sales or
marketing campaign.
Version 7.0 will let users make more limited queries that could,
for instance, focus on one customer. It also allows existing data,
along with long-term historical information, to be integrated into
a query.
For example, a fraud-detection application at a credit card company
might in real time detect a transaction by a user and check that
purchase against all other records in the database to determine if
it is aberrant and indicative of potential theft, said Farrell.
Other enhancements include a load-balancing feature that can
prioritise time-sensitive queries without slowing down the overall
performance of the application.
It can also partition chunks of related data - such as monthly or
weekly sales records - and run queries on them on a single server
processor, which speeds performance. Normally, the data has to be
distributed across processors equally, which is more
time-consuming, Farrell said.
Teradata Warehouse Version 7.0 will be available in December.