Designing for Parallel Processing in the Data Warehouse Environment
Because the Teradata architecture was designed from the outset to support a relational database management system, its component subsystems were all designed to optimally support the established norms for such system, including full normalization of the database schema. Significant for the handling of normalized data was the incorporation of parallel processing into the system.
For example, because it was designed to perform parallel processing from the outset, the Teradata 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. In other words, the so‑called “pathologies of big data” (Jacobs, 2009) do not affect Teradata Database.
Repeating for emphasis, the Teradata architecture is parallel from the ground up and has always been so. Its file system, message subsystem, lock manager, and query optimizer all fit together snugly, all working in parallel.