A design goal of Teradata Database was to provide a single data store for a variety of client architectures. This approach greatly reduces data duplication and inaccuracies that can creep into data that is maintained in multiple stores.
This approach to data storage is known as the single version of the business, and Teradata Database implements this through heterogeneous client access. Clients can access a single copy of enterprise data and Teradata Database takes care of such things as data type translation, connections, concurrency, and workload management.
The following figure illustrates the idea of heterogeneous client access, where mainframe-attached and workstation-attached systems can access and manipulate the same database simultaneously. In this figure, the mainframe is attached via channel connections and other systems are attached via network connections.
