Seven Questions for Teradata

I'm about to attend day two of Teradata's annual third-party industry influencers meeting. I know of no company that makes a more serious and sincere effort to reach out to independent industry analysts (who follow enterprise data warehouse (EDW) vendors), not only as a market-messaging channel but also to hear our perceptions of their and their rivals' technology, solutions, and positioning. So I'm grateful for the opportunity to listen, to voice my opinions, and, per the agenda distributed by analyst-relations manager extraordinaire Kim Dossey, to "Ask Any Question." An invitation like that one doesn't come along too often from a company of Teradata's stature. Nonetheless, I'll take liberties and assume that "Ask Any Question" means I can attempt to get in seven. Here they are and, noting that I'm probing sensitive and proprietary areas with some of them, I'll plan to post what I learn to the extent I'm able.If you read my stuff regularly, you know that I focus on domains that push up against the boundaries of established BI and other analytical technologies. Teradata is well positioned in some of them including "big data," database parallelization, and embedded, in-database analytics. (Disclosure: Teradata has paid me to write an in-database analytics white paper, which should appear soon, and a couple of customer case studies, and the company paid for my flights and lodging for the influencers meeting.) So by way of "Ask Any Question" questions, let's go for edge areas that I see as important to analytics users and therefore to Teradata, but where Teradata's solutions are perhaps not fully realized.

Three technical questions are enough. Let's move to one half-technical, half-business question, followed by two business questions, and a final dual question:

I have no illusion that I'll get responses I can post to some of these questions, especially 5 and 6, or even that I'll get much at all by way of response, but that doesn't mean I can't ask. (Or rather, try to ask: it's not as if I'll be the only one there with questions.) Teradata has few serious rivals in the enterprise data warehousing market, and the invitation to "Ask Any Question" is just too good to pass up. I'll post what I can to Twitter (@SethGrimes) with the hashtag #TD3pi and perhaps in a subsequent blog article.

Addendum, April 28, 4:48 pm Pacific

Three Answers

I got in three of my questions, the three technical questions. Here are Teradata CTO Stephen Brobst's answers, as tweeted by me, numbers matching the question numbers above:

MapReduce is, of course, an approach to parallel processing that is implemented, notably, by Apache Hadoop and also as a parallel database programming framework by Teradata competitor Aster Data. Teradata is pursuing integration of external Hadoop resources into the Teradata DBMS engine.I'm about to attend day two of Teradata's annual third-party industry influencers meeting. I'm grateful for the opportunity to listen, to voice my opinions, and, per the agenda distributed by analyst-relations manager extraordinaire Kim Dossey, to "Ask Any Question." I'll actually aim for seven. Here they are...