What is the Teradata Database?

The Teradata Database is a relational database management system (RDBMS) that drives a company's data warehouse. The Teradata Database provides the foundation to give a company the power to grow, to compete in today's dynamic marketplace, and to evolve the business by getting answers to a new generation of questions. The Teradata Database's scalability allows the system to grow as the business grows, from gigabytes to terabytes and beyond. The Teradata Database's unique technology has been proven at customer sites across industries and around the world.

The Teradata Database is an open system, compliant with ANSI standards. It is currently available on UNIX MP-RAS, Windows 2000, and Linux operating systems. The Teradata Database is a large database server that accomodates multiple client applications making inquiries against it concurrently. Various client platforms access the database through a TCP-IP connection or across an IBM mainframe channel connection. The ability to manage large amounts of data is accomplished using the concept of parallelism, wherein many individual processors perform smaller tasks concurrently to accomplish an operation against a huge repository of data. To date, only parallel architectures can handle databases of this size.

Scalability: Ability to grow the system along multiple dimensions (data, users, number of concurrent queries, complexity of queries) without experiencing performance degradation.