Benjamin Franklin once observed "...in this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes". Planned down time can easily be added to that list. It's a certainty that any given IT system will require some planned down time to address security fixes, make configuration changes, or expand storage and compute capacity.

Tired of parsing the output from Ferret SHOWBLOCKS and SHOWWHERE commands?  You don’t need to do that anymore with the release of the SQL SHOWBLOCKS and SQL SHOWWHERE features. The SQL SHOWBLOCKS feature is available in Teradata Database 15.0, and SQL SHOWWHERE is available in 15.10.

Database users are increasingly becoming more comfortable with storing their data in database systems located in public or private clouds. For example, Amazon RDS (relational database service) is used by approximately half of all customers of Amazon’s AWS cloud.

Guest post by Dr. Daniel Abadi, March 6, 2015

Optimizing Disk IO and Memory for Big Data Vector Analysis

Teradata QueryGrid and Adaptive Optimization:

Not Your Typical DBMS-Hadoop Connector

Dr. Daniel Abadi  October 17, 2014

Thisis a guest post by Dr. Abadi also posted at http://blogs.teradata.com/data-points/teradata-querygrid-and-adaptive-optimization/ 

New DBQL logging options USECOUNT and STATSUSAGE, introduced in Teradata Database 14.10, enable the logging of used and missing statistics.  The output of this logging can be utilized to find used, unused, and missing statistics globally (for all queries) or for just a subset of queries.

The following instructions should help you set up and configure the Teradata SQL H capability with your Hadoop instance. First, however, you need to download and start up a Teradata Express image with the SQL H Connector installed. On the Teradata Express for VMware Player, download on of the following two versions.

Teradata Database Enhancement Requests

Do you have a Teradata Database enhancement request? You can submit your Teradata Database enhancement request at: http://www.teradata-partners.com/partners-user-group/enhancement-requests

Teradata Express 15.0 is now available so that you can evaluate the new features of Teradata. Teradata Database 15.0 is the newest release of Teradata’s industry-leading RDBMS.  This release extends Teradata’s leadership in several key areas, and continues to position Teradata Database as the database of choice for Integrated Warehousing, Business Analytics, and participation in the Unified Data Architecture.  

Statistics provides valuable information to the optimizer to make decisions on generating optimal explain plan.  The information about the statistics can be obtained by using the “Help Statistics” command however the displayed data cannot be used to join with other tables.  The article provides a java stored procedure and DDL which extracts the output of

Teradata is announcing new Teradata Express 14.10 images. These new images are at patch level 14.10.00.02 which represents the current shipping version of Teradata 14.10. This gives you access to the recently released Teradata 14.10 database for your test and development needs.

Important

Teradata Express for VMware Player (TDE-V) is a free, fully operational Teradata Virtual Machine with up to one terabyte of storage. Imagine being able to install a fully operational Teradata database on your PC and be running queries in five minutes, easy as 1-2-3.

There are lies, damned lies and … statistics.  Statistics are “the science that deals with the collection, classification, analysis, and interpretation of numerical facts or data, and that, by use of mathematical theories of probability, imposes order and regularity on aggregates of more or less disparate elements.”  At least that is according to the definition provided by the Merriam-Webster Dictionary.  Many other more philosophical definitions have been provided for statistics over time, as well as many observations regarding the value of statistics.

Cloud Computing is a computing service provisioning and delivery model in which users get access to dynamically scalable computing capacity over the network in a pay-as-you-use payment scheme. While its attractiveness may differ depending on whom you've talked to, its service-oriented nature gives users two important benefits: ease of application deployment (someone else's hard works laying down the hardware and software foundation) and on-demand access anytime from anywhere. These characterstics make Cloud Computing ideally suited for developers who want to quickly try something out in an isolated "good" environment without the overhead of system setup or the capital expenses of paying for systems they no longer need after they are done. 

Teradata Corporation is pleased to announce the availability of new Teradata Express versions based on our recently released version 14.0 of the Teradata database. The Teradata Express program is a freely licensed virtual instance of the Teradata database. It is fully functional for evaluation, test and development purposes.

Teradata Express for VMware (TDE-V) is a free, fully operational Teradata VM with up to one terabyte of storage. Imagine being able to install a fully operational Teradata database on your PC and be running queries in five minutes, easy as 1-2-3.

Everyone is aware of Teradata’s continued commitment to reducing the footprint and resource usage of data by adding compression capabilities and the result on perm space savings and performance, by reducing block size, IO and spool usage.  

The PERIOD data type was introduced in Teradata 13.0. This follow-on article builds on the first article (Exploring Teradata 13's PERIOD Data Type) and will again make heavy use of examples, but this time we will dig into the functions that are part of this new feature set.

If you have not read the first article, consider doing that now and then returning here. The examples here will use the tables introduced in the first article and add a few more.

The following information covers a handful of the basics of the Teradata architecture, to help new Teradata users better understand what considerations should go into creating a table.

“The art of war teaches us to rely not on the likelihood of the enemy's not coming, but on our own readiness to receive him; not on the chance of his not attacking, but rather on the fact that we have made our position unassailable.”

The Art of War - General Sun Tzu

If you lived in a house that was located in a neighborhood that had a high level of crime, you would take steps to secure your home in a manner that would deter a break in, prevent future attempts and track those who have trespassed to collect evidence for prosecution. This would require multiple layers of security as only one system would not be effective in thwarting additional break ins and identifying criminals. The first level of added security might be signs or decals on the windows that communicate that the house has a security system. Additional layers might include glass-break sensors, motion and heat detectors and cameras. Lastly sirens and flashing lights would be set off if certain events transpired. This would all be tied into a central system that would collect, analyze and send data to specified authorities. In a similar manner, defense in depth is a strategy that involves implementing multiple layers of security defense mechanisms to protect critical business data.  The idea is that if a single layer or mechanism fails or is compromised,  there will be other layers and mechanisms in place to ensure the security of the data.

The PERIOD data type was introduced in Teradata 13.0. This first article will use examples to dig into the concepts that are part of this new feature. The second article will use examples to examine all the functions available in version 13.0.

The purpose of this series was to give you some basic queries that I use to provide me with a quick snapshot of how well tuned an EDW is from a workload analysis and database tuning perspective.

The four topics were (direct links are provided at the end of the article):

• Part 1 - Excessive Use of String Manipulation Verbs
• Part 2 - Analyze Secondary Index Usage
• Part 3 - Statistics Analysis
• Part 4 - Compression Analysis

Have you tried them yet??

Ok, so I shouldn’t even need to broach this topic, as I’m sure you have all heard it before: compress, compress, and compress.

In Part 3 of this series, we will take a quick look at how statistics are implemented and maintained at your site.

Statistics Collection can be a complicated and very deep-dive topic, with discussions on the frequency of collection, whether to use sampled stats, automation strategies, etc. This analysis is not going to go that deep, it is a high-level look at the statistics on the tables, and I am looking for just two things:

• Are statistics applied to the tables or missing?
• For those that are applied, is there consistency in the application and collection process?

For those new to Teradata, Teradata Express for VMware Player and Teradata Express for Amazon EC2 are great ways to get started with our database. These preconfigured, ready to go virtual images make getting started quick and painless. All that's left to do is fire up a query tool and write some SQL, right?

In Part 1 of this series, we looked at the Excessive use of String Manipulation Verbs in a query. Here is that link in case you missed it:

When first installing Teradata Express for your VMware or Amazon EC2 environment, there are some basic configuration steps that we need to make based on the IP addresses that are given to the instance when it is started.

Let's see how to make the Teradata Express for VMware (TDE-V) image easily accessible for moving flat files to and from the image.

This article delves into the potential excessive use of Multi-Column (MC) Statistics and a process for identifying those that are not providing benefit and should be removed. This will reduce complexity and save resources on the re-collection of these redundant statistics.

I gave a presentation at the Teradata Partners Conference last week on the fundamentals of collecting statistics, where I touched briefly on the rules behind confidence levels. I’m using this article to go into further depth, and offer you more examples of how these confidence levels come about.

The Teradata Agile Analytic Cloud allows business users and developers to easily allocate an elastic data mart (i.e. a database) inside the Teradata System.

We all know the benefits of identifying and fixing badly performing workloads. Many sites use the common method of identifying the top n highest consuming or skewed queries (often the same queries) and fixing those.

The Teradata Express program offers customers a free evaluation version of the Teradata database as a download from Teradata.com.  While the Express edition is not licensed for production usage and is not officially supported, this is a fully functional Teradata database that is a great tool for developers and testers working on their Teradata projects or other who want hands-on learning with Teradata. 

Click here for download information.

Cloud Computing is a computing service provisioning and delivery model in which users get access to dynamically scalable computing capacity over the network in a pay-as-you-use payment scheme. While its attractiveness may differ depending on whom you've talked to, its service-oriented nature gives users two important benefits: ease of application deployment (someone else's hard works laying down the hardware and software foundation) and on-demand access anytime from anywhere. These characterstics make Cloud Computing ideally suited for developers who want to quickly try something out in an isolated "good" environment without the overhead of system setup or the capital expenses of paying for systems they no longer need after they are done. 

On August 24, 2009 Teradata Corporation announced the availability of innovative software that virtualizes data storage: Teradata Virtual Storage (TVS). TVS enables Teradata customers to add storage capacity at very low cost and to maximize performance to meet the enterprise intelligence demands of business users. Teradata has used virtualization techniques since the mid 1990s with the technology that virtualizes the resources of the node through the AMP based architecture. AMPs were once hardware devices, back in the days of the Teradata DBC 1012 database computers. Since the mid 1990s, AMPs have been referred to, and utilized, as a type of virtual processor (vproc), specifically, an AMP vproc.

Cached plans are good. For repetitive queries, cached plans remove the overhead of parsing and optimizing, and this helps short work perform more consistently.

This article examines what Enterprise Logical Data Models (ELDMs) are, what the value of Enterprise Logical Data Models can be, and why that value is sometimes not able to be realized.  Some real world scenarios are offered to illustrate what can happen with regard to the use, disuse,  and development of ELDMs.

Have you ever had what looks like a great query plan turn into life in the slow lane at run time?

Maybe your company is thinking of opening a new branch office if there are enough customers who live within the target area. Or maybe you want to let your customers know which of your stores they are closest to. Maybe you want to investigate the routes your delivery trucks take.

This article provides a high-level overview of the process involved in moving to Teradata 13. Teradata 13 offers many new features and some of the highlights are covered in other articles on DEV/X. The focus here is how to get to Teradata 13.0.

Authors: Carrie Ballinger, Rama Krishna Korlapati, Paul Sinclair

Looking for a fresh perspective on collecting statistics, or just want a confirmation that you’re on the right track? Either way, you’ll want to read this quick summary of recommendations for Teradata 12 stats collection.

More than likely, you need to keep track of the beginning and ending of some kind of an event. Maybe you track how long employees have been with your company, how much time users spend on a particular web site, or the duration of insurance policies.

Some of you may be familiar with relational databases other than Teradata and how those other RDBMs utilize indexes.

In Teradata, an “Index” is a physical mechanism that is used to distribute, store, and access data rows. Indexes provide a physical access path to the data and their use can avoid unnecessary full-table scans to locate rows.