This week, we at TDWI produced our third annual Solution Summit on Master Data, Quality, and Governance, again in Savannah, Georgia. Jill Dyché and I moderated the conference, and we lined up a host of great user speakers and vendor panelists. The audience asked dozens of insightful questions, and the event included hundreds of one-to-on meetings among attendees, speakers, and vendor sponsors. The aggregated result was a massive knowledge transfer that highlights most of today’s burning issues in master data management, data quality, and data governance. I’d like to share with you some of the themes and insights that arose at the TDWI Solution Summit.
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Posted by Philip Russom, Ph.D. on March 14, 20110 comments
Teradata’s recent acquisition of Aster Data Systems is a huge signal that worlds of “big data” and data warehousing are coming together. The deal itself was not a surprise; Teradata made a down payment on Aster last September, when it bought 11 percent of the company. And before making that initial investment, Teradata proved that it was not averse to bringing in other people’s database engines by acquiring Kickfire, an innovator in MySQL and analytic appliances. However, unlike Kickfire, which was floundering in the market but offered interesting “SQL on a chip” technology, Aster was successful and well-funded. Teradata will now have an opportunity to expand its appeal beyond traditional, SQL-based data warehousing into the realm of particularly unstructured big data – and provide the technology to bring these worlds together.
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Posted by David Stodder on March 11, 20110 comments
The Teradata Partners User Conference is one of the largest dedicated data warehousing conferences, pulling BI professionals from all over the world. Its attendees are collectively the most sophisticated users of BI anywhere. Given that Teradata is reinvigorated since the spinoff from NCR and more nimble and responsive, this is a good fit. Here are highlights of what I learned in my brief (1 day) visit to Partners.
Teradata Appliances
Teradata is having good success selling the 2650 machine, which customers are using primarily for departmental warehouses and dependent data marts. Customers like the product because unlike some competitors (e.g. Netezza), the box is easily expandable and highly scalable. You buy only the nodes you need, and if you reach the capacity of the box, you simply buy another, connect it with the first via gigabyte Ethernet, and redistribute the data. With other appliances, you need a forklift upgrade. (Although a Netezza customer said this wasn’t a major inconvenience.) The only downside to the 2650 appliance is that many people still don’t know that it exists. And Teradata, which always priced its products at a premium, recently lowered the list price on the 2650, making it competitively affordable.
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Posted on October 28, 20100 comments