Teradata is a software company, founded in 1979, that develops and sells a relational

database management system with the same name. Teradata was a division of the NCR
Corporation, which acquired the Teradata Company on February 28, 1991. However, on
January 8, 2007, NCR announced that it would spin-off Teradata as an independently
traded company.

Teradata Enterprise Data Warehouses are often accessed via ODBC, JDBC or via native
support by applications running on operating systems such as Microsoft Windows or
flavors of UNIX. The warehouse typically sources data from operational systems via a
combination of batch and trickle loads.

Teradata acts as a single data store that can accept large numbers of concurrent requests
from multiple client applications. Significant features include:

• Unconditional parallelism, with load distribution shared among several servers.

• Complex ad hoc queries with up to 64 joins.
• Parallel efficiency, such that the effort for creating 100 records is same as that for
creating 100,000 records.
• Scalability, so that increasing of the number of processors of an existing system
linearly increases the performance. Performance thus does not deteriorate with an
increased number of users.

Teradata is a massively parallel processing system running a shared nothing architecture.

The Teradata DBMS is linearly and predictably scalable in all dimensions of a database
system workload (data volume, breadth, number of users, complexity of queries).[2] The
scalability explains its popularity for enterprise data warehousing applications. Teradata
is offered on Intel servers interconnected by the proprietary BYNET messaging fabric.
Teradata systems are offered with either Teradata-branded LSI or EMC disk arrays for
database storage.

Customers:

Teradata currently has over 1,000 customers and over 1,900 installations of its RDBMS.
One of the largest and most prominent customers are in retail domain like Wal-Mart,
Tesco and SUPERVALU Inc, which run their central inventory, enterprise reporting,
category planning and other financial systems on Teradata. Other Teradata customers
include companies such as AT&T (formerly SBC), Royal Bank of Canada, Dell, eBay,
Wells Fargo, Bank of America, Best Buy, Capital One, Sears, Nike, Coca Cola, Bell
Canada, American Airlines, Telstra, Optus, Lloyds TSB, Bharti Airtel, Vodafone,
Continental Airlines and FedEx.

Competition

Teradata's main competitors are other high-end solutions from vendors such as Oracle,
IBM, and Sybase IQ, as well as HP Neoview which is based on a massively
parallel/shared nothing architecture. Recent competition has arisen from data warehouse
appliance vendors such as Netezza, DATAllegro (acquired in August, 2008 by
Microsoft), Aster Data Systems, Greenplum and Vertica Systems, and from packaged
data warehouse applications such as SAP and Kalido. These have slowed Teradata's
penetration into the mid-market and some verticals, particularly energy.