Goals
- A large capacity, parallel processing database system with thousands of MIPS capable of storing terabytes to petabytes of total user data and billions of rows in a single table.
- Fault tolerance, with no single point of failure, to make sure of data integrity.
- Redundant network connectivity to make sure of system throughput.
- Manageable, scalable growth.
- A fully-relational database management system using a standard, non-proprietary access language.
- An extensive and extensible set of data types, including support for structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data.
- Faster response times than any competing relational database management systems.
- A centralized shared information architecture in which a single version of the truth is presented to users.
There is a difference between a single version (or source) of the truth and a single view of the truth. You can have multiple views of the truth, but these must be based on a single version of the truth to be reliable for decision making.
Architected for Parallel Processing
Because Vantage was designed to perform parallel processing from the outset, the Teradata system architecture does not suffer from the allocation of shared resources that other system that have been adapted for parallelism experience. This is because the system is designed to maximize throughput, while multiple dimensions of parallel processing are available for each individual system user.
The Vantage parallel technology is optimized to perform tasks in a normalized environment that other relational DBMSs cannot match with a denormalized schema. Teradata is also optimized to perform tasks in a denormalized environment. Among the special performance advantages built into the Teradata system are the following: star join and other join optimizations, full-table scan optimization, specially designed index types, a full complement of SQL aggregate and ordered analytical functions, and the most sophisticated parallel-aware SQL query optimizer available.