NCR Will Upgrade Teradata for OLAP & DM
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ComputerWorld has reported that NCR Corp. plans to turn its Teradata database into a turbocharger for OLAP and data mining applications. Specifically, NCR is prepping a Teradata upgrade that can take over pieces of the analysis calculations currently run on separate online analytical processing (OLAP) and data mining servers. That means data will no longer have to be pulled out of Teradata and reassembled on other servers.

The new release, which is due to ship in stages between now and July, is the first of two big changes NCR has in store for Teradata this year. The Dayton, Ohio, company also is working on a Windows NT version to free the decision-support database from its niche in the realm of large data warehouses.

Both the upgrade and Windows NT support will deliver features that Anthem Insurance Cos. has been seeking from NCR, said Joe Bruscato, who is in charge of data warehouse design at the Indianapolis-based health insurer. New data-linking mechanisms should make loading Anthem's 1T-byte Teradata warehouse less complicated and time-consuming, Bruscato said. The OLAP and data mining capabilities also are intriguing for future applications, he said. And Windows NT will provide a low-cost way to split out slices of the data warehouse for specific users or special-case applications, Bruscato said. "It's going to open up a lot of opportunities for using Teradata at the lower level."

Tony Marshall, a senior technology analyst at Hallmark Cards, Inc., in Kansas City, Mo., said he also is eager to check out Teradata's OLAP and data mining capabilities. Hallmark stores more than 1 billion rows of point-of-sale data in Teradata for analysis by 300 users.

The built-in analysis capabilities won't eliminate the need for Teradata users to hook separate OLAP and data mining engines to the database, said Merv Adrian, an analyst at Giga Information Group, in Santa Clara, Calif. But he said the upgraded Teradata will be able to do sampling, rankings and other data calculations itself, which should produce faster results and cut down on the heavy amount of data manipulation and preprocessing that users now have to do. Teradata's parallel processing power also should let users analyze bigger chunks of data that can really overwhelm some of the OLAP engines Adrian said.

According to ComputerWorld sources, other new features in Version 2 Release 3 include a 40% boost in query speeds; event-based triggers; and expanded support for joining data stored in different tables. The NT version was initially expected late last year, but NCR is aiming for a summer release, the sources said. Teradata currently runs only on NCR's own Unix operating system and hardware.