Teradata Background Check

The Teradata database was originally designed in 1976, by TERADATA Corp. Nearly 25 years later, Teradata is still considered ahead of its time.

In 1976, IBM, mainframes dominated the computer business. However the original founders of TD noticed that it took about 4½ years for IBM to produce a new mainframe. At the same time, they also noticed a little company called Intel. Intel created a new processing chip every 2 ½ years. With mainframe moving forward every 4½ years compared to Intel ability to produce a new microprocessor every 2½ years, Teradata envisioned a breakthrough design that would shake the pillars of the industry. This vision was to network several microprocessor chips together so they would be able to work in parallel. This vision provided another benefit, which was the cost of networking microprocessor chips would be hundreds of times cheaper than a mainframe.

The Teradata founder set two primary goals when they designed Teradata which were:

• Perform Parallel Processing
• Accommodate a Terabyte of DATA

In 1984, the DBC/1012 was introduced. Since then, Teradata has been the dominant force in Data Warehousing.

Parallel processing is the integral part of Teradata from the beginning. Till now it is the only database that loads data in parallel, backs-up data in parallel and processes data in parallel. The idea of parallel processing gives Teradata the ability to have unlimited users, unlimited power, and unlimited scalability.

It was 12 a.m. on a Saturday night and two friends were out on the town. One of the friends looked at his watch and said, “I have to get going.” The other friend responded, “What’s the hurry?” His friend went on to tell him that he had to leave to do his laundry at the Laundromat. The other friend could not believe his ears. He responded, “What! You’re leaving to do your laundry on a Saturday night? Why don’t you do it tomorrow?”. His buddy went on to explain that there were only 10 washing machines at the laundry. “If I wait until tomorrow, it will be crowded and I will be lucky to get one washing machine. I have 10 loads of laundry, so I will be there all day. If I go now, nobody will be there, and I can do all 10 loads at the same time. I’ll be done in less than an hour and a half.”

This story describes what we call “Parallel Processing“. Teradata was born to be parallel, and instead of allowing just 10 loads of wash to be done simultaneously, Teradata allows for hundreds … even thousands of loads to be done simultaneously.