Teradata

Last Updated: 10th March 2023
Analyst Coverage: Philip Howard

Teradata hardly needs an introduction: it is the longest established pure-play data warehouse vendor. The publicly traded (NYSE:TDC) 40 year old company has offices throughout the world and across all continents (except Antarctica), with 100s of proven vertical and enterprise customer use cases.

It was first incorporated in 1979, in the days when a “tera” byte of data was “big data”. It released the world’s first parallel data warehouse in 1984 and has been a (if not the) leader in the data warehousing space ever since. It became a public company in 1987 but was acquired by NCR four years later. Thereafter it regained independence from NCR in 1997 and, once again, became a public company in 2007. The company has made a number of significant acquisitions over the last decade, including Claraview, Aprimo, Aster Data Systems and others. In 2014 it acquired Think Big Analytics, which now forms the heart of Teradata’s consulting practices around big data, including AnalyticOps, and in late 2017 it spun off Starburst as a company focused on the Presto SQL Engine.

Company Info

Headquarters: 17095 Via Del Campo, San Diego, CA 92127 USA
Telephone: +1 858 485 4000

Teradata Vantage

Last Updated: 19th November 2021
Mutable Award: Gold 2021

What is it?

Teradata Vantage is a data warehousing and analytics solution that is effectively a merger between what was previously Teradata Database and Aster Analytics. It delivers advanced analytics while supporting machine learning and graph functions. Moreover, it makes it easy for analysts, data scientists, and line of business users alike to harness these functions to address business opportunities.

Deployment options for Teradata Vantage are varied, and include on-premises and cloud options (notably including hybrid cloud), but for the purposes of this report we focus on the latter, and thus explore Teradata Vantage as a cloud solution. As such, we have split our discussion into two parts: the first is a truncated discussion of the platform’s general functionality (see our prior InBrief on Teradata Vantage for the full discussion) while the second explores the product’s cloud capabilities specifically.

Customer Quotes

“A lot of cloud providers are saying they have [flexibility and scalability]. But what’s the real cost of the solution? What’s the price-performance and scalability? Can it handle complex workloads? We knew that Teradata can not only handle the simple 3-second queries, but also the complex queries with many joins without suffering in query response times.”
Brinker International

“Going to the cloud with Teradata Vantage on AWS, it was amazing to see what other vendors only touted. I can scale up, in double or triple the size, within minutes and have all the computing power separate from storage to do the big workloads. Then, scale back down to keep ongoing cost-effectiveness in place.”
Brinker International

How does it work (in general)?

Teradata supports a wide variety of languages for analytic purposes, most notably Python and R, as well as Jupyter Notebooks. It also offers an AnalyticOps Accelerator, a collection of best practices, proven design patterns, and tried-and-tested code derived from successful Teradata projects, that is designed to make it much easier for you to implement an AnalyticsOps framework.

The platform offers graph capability, support for machine learning, and access to “Advanced SQL”, Teradata’s extension to SQL in support of advanced analytics and machine learning at scale. This includes time-series and temporal functions that, along with comprehensive geo-spatial support, are combined in what Teradata calls “4D Analytics”.

Teradata also provides a wide range of industry and analytic models.

How does it work (in the cloud)?

All of the capabilities described above are delivered in the cloud just as they are on-premises, allowing Teradata Vantage to be used as a highly effective cloud data analytics platform. It can be deployed across a number of clouds, including the “big three” of AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud, as well as VMware, Teradata Cloud, and purpose-built on-premises infrastructure.

Multi-cloud, hybrid cloud, and hybrid multi-cloud are all supported, and in terms of the cloud the product is generally delivered as a service. Any number of instances can be viewed, managed and monitored using the same web interface, which is particularly important for multi-cloud. In addition, Teradata Vantage is a highly portable solution (including its licensing – see below), largely owing to the fact that it uses the same software across all platforms. Teradata also provides data migration tools and best practices, and combined with the company’s experience with cloud migrations, moving an instance from one cloud to another should be a relatively painless process.

Fig 01 - Teradata Vantage ‘Big 3’ cloud integrations

What’s more, the platform’s relationship with these clouds reaches significantly beyond just deployment.

In fact, Teradata Vantage is closely aligned with all three major clouds, and boasts integration with a wide variety of Microsoft, Amazon and Google cloud services, as shown in Figure 1. Moreover, Teradata Vantage offers a software architecture (see Figure 2) that is well suited to the cloud, which helps to take advantage of the aforementioned cloud services provided by Azure, AWS and GCP.

Fig 02 - Teradata Vantage cloud architecture

Pricing models for Teradata Vantage in the cloud are flexible, consisting of both capacity-based pricing (‘blended’) and pay-as-you-go usage-based pricing (‘consumption’). The latter, in particular, provides automatic elasticity, and you only pay for successful queries and loads. It also boasts highly trackable usage statistics (which makes for predictable pricing), and departmental chargeback, among other things. In short, you are able to choose whichever pricing model suits your needs, most likely in terms of high or low (or unknown) utilisation. Also notable is that all Teradata Vantage cloud deployments are single-tenant, which has benefits for both performance and stability, and that Teradata’s pricing models and licenses are portable across cloud (and even on-premises) environments.

Teradata Vantage also offers separation of storage from compute, which helps support these pricing models (particularly consumption pricing). That said, it is not strictly required. Elastic scaling, dynamic resource allocation, software performance optimisation (via indexing and determining least-cost execution methods), and workload management are all available, and all contribute to performance in one way or another. Dynamic resource allocation also addresses data replication and data drift, as well as query prioritisation more complex than ‘first come, first serve’.

Why should you care?

Teradata has been the gold standard for data warehousing for several decades. While new challengers have emerged over the last few years, they have neither the breadth nor the depth that Teradata can offer. While machine learning support is increasingly common currency other vendors cannot typically compete with the capabilities offered by 4D Analytics. This will be particularly true within IoT (Internet of Things) environments but is by no means limited to those use cases.

As a cloud solution, Teradata admixes its signature, widely-regarded analytics with the benefits of the cloud. This most notably includes increased flexibility, scalability, and ease of use. Starting with a modest Teradata cloud deployment, paying only for what you use and scaling up precisely as much as you need to also removes much of the onboarding difficulties that often come with a solution as broad and fully-featured as Teradata, while at the same time reducing risk and hastening time to value.

The Bottom Line

Teradata Vantage is well-known for its performance, scalability, high availability and reliability. These qualities are retained, and in some cases enhanced, in cloud deployments. In short, with its strong history, proven use cases and exceptional capabilities, Teradata Vantage should be considered for any cloud and/or on-premises analytic database requirements.

Mutable Award: Gold 2021