Goals of Teradata Database
- 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 ensure data integrity.
- Redundant network connectivity to ensure 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. It is quite possible, and often very necessary, to have multiple views of the truth, but these multiple views should all be based on a single version of the truth if they are to be relied upon for decision making.
Architected for Parallel Processing
Because Teradata Database 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. Repeating for emphasis: the Teradata Database 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.
The Teradata 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.