Teradata Reviews

We use it as a staging database in our organization, serving as a repository for financial models.

The current operational approach needs improvement. In the past, relying on infrastructure data staging provided flexibility in collaborating with any database provider. However, transitioning to Informatica and integrating it with various data services proved beneficial for serving multiple clients. Despite its advantages, this approach incurred substantial costs in terms of hardware and technical expertise. To address this, there is a need to develop and offer free content and workshops, providing guidelines and technical knowledge for efficient data operation.

I have been working with it for seven years.

I would rate its stability capabilities eight out of ten.

I would rate its scalability abilities six out of ten. While it provides scalability, it is notably complicated.

We previously used IBM, but due to the market requirements, we switched to Teradata.

The initial setup was straightforward.

It takes a couple of hours to be completely deployed.

It comes at a notably high cost for what it offers. Apart from the standard licensing fees, there are supplementary costs associated with the licensing course. I would rate it one out of ten.

Overall, I would rate it eight out of ten.

Teradata is primarily used for data warehousing across all customers. My clients have built-in applications that use Teradata, and their use varies from customer to customer, depending on the industry and database size. The primary function is as an OLAP analytical ecosystem.

Scalability is excellent because of Teradata's parallelism. It doesn't impact operations when nodes are added. This allows customers to expand without migrating the entire database or system.

The most valuable aspects of Teradata are not specific features. Rather, it's the overall performance, particularly parallelism, workload management, and parallel computing. Teradata effectively uses parallelism to the granular level, performing better than other databases.

Teradata is somewhat late in adopting cloud technology. They need to focus on the adoption of cloud to remain competitive and target customers who prefer not to invest in capital expenditures and seek a more flexible, operational expenditure approach.

I have worked with Teradata for around 15 years, from Teradata version six to version 14.

Teradata is highly stable. The workload management and software maturity provide a reliable system, unlike some newer cloud software that can exhibit misbehavior.

Even if an organization starts small, Teradata offers the flexibility to expand by adding nodes or more storage, especially in cloud environments, without incurring downtime or taking systems offline.

The technical support from Teradata is quite advanced. However, like any support service, there can be delays. I rate the support as eight out of ten because of their technical expertise.

Positive

During my career, I've been involved primarily with Teradata, and some clients are migrating from Teradata to other technologies.

The initial setup process is rated as eight out of ten. It's straightforward. That said, when migrating databases from other systems, challenges arise in redesigning the code to optimize parallelism.

The implementation is managed by a separate customer service group within Teradata, not by me or my group.

Teradata is high-quality at a premium price. Initially, it may seem expensive compared to similar cloud databases, however, it offers significant value in performance, stability, and overall output once in use.

New users should focus on understanding Teradata's parallelism and write their queries or codes to utilize its full potential. Knowing how to use workload management effectively is beneficial.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.

We use Teradata as our company's data warehouse engine to process tons of data since we are the Central Bank of Columbia, where we use that for statistics to study several areas of banking. Our main database, data warehousing, data mining, and back office statistics are done with the help of Teradata. We heavily use Oracle as our transactional database, but we use Teradata for all other purposes.

I am not exactly the person doing the programming and exploring the product's different features. To get information on the product's features, I will have to contact some engineers in charge of programming. The most valuable feature of the product is the ability of the product to process huge amounts of data without creating conflicts in the queries. The way the database and IntelliFlex are designed, you can process several queries from different applications simultaneously, and they don't conflict with each other. I mean, I think that's the reason why we find improvements in our query time. The way the queries are internally in IntelliFlex process makes them less complicated. In other databases, when you start a query, the dataset is put on hold for a while, so all the queries have to wait for the first query to finish. IntelliFlex and Teradata are designed to avoid such an issue because I am unsure. I feel Teradata IntelliFlex can function in the aforementioned manner since they manage smaller sets of data, because of which there are no conflict queries between one and the other.

I don't have the exact details of the improvement needed in the performance of Teradata IntelliFlex because I work with the infrastructure department. The infrastructure department is in charge of getting infrastructure for the system to work, but before having Teradata, the data processing was taking a lot longer than it is now. We got into Teradata because we needed fast processing of huge amounts of data since, in the past, we were trying to achieve it with Oracle databases, and it wasn't good enough. In the last two years, the processing times have reduced by a third or a fourth of the time without causing any problems because of the efficiency of the Teradata engine.

The only issue our company has with Teradata IntelliFlex is that it is not cost-effective because of the way the product has been designed. We have Teradata IntelliFlex on-premises because we pay for a lot of muscle that we are not using. The problem we're seeing is that when we try to move into Teradata IntelliFlex's cloud services, we notice that Teradata doesn't have a flexible price structure to allow you to use a fraction of IntelliFlex's extension and charge just for the use of the solution. We receive messages from Teradata asking us to pay for the services we use on-premises, while in reality we use less than 30 percent of the machine's capacity.

There is something that is not working in favor of the business models for IntelliFlex when you plan to move to the cloud.

I have been using Teradata IntelliFlex for two years. Our company plans to renew the solution's latest version, but the hardware is around two years old.

Stability-wise, I rate the solution a nine out of ten. In the two years we have been using the platform, we have had only one or two issues that got the service out for a few hours.

The product's scalability is great. Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten.

I rate the technical support a nine to ten out of ten.

Positive

The initial setup was straightforward. Before IntelliFlex, we were using Teradata's 2700 and 2800 appliances. We were moving from a Teradata appliance to a new Teradata appliance, and during that process, we were able to move all the data in between three to six months without a problem, keeping both platforms working until we moved into IntelliFlex. The setup phase was a good process.

The solution is deployed on-premises. We are planning to move to the cloud in the future.

We feel that we are given the services from Teradata IntelliFlex for what we are paying. We are the Central Bank of Colombia, a non-profit organization, making it difficult for us to say that because of IntelliFlex, our earnings have increased. My institution doesn't aim for any earnings. We have been able to provide much better services to all of our customers, including all the financial institutions in our country, because of which I can say there has been a return on investment using Teradata IntelliFlex. A return on investment is possible based on the improvements in our service to our customers.

Our company is just looking to see if there is another product other than Teradata IntelliFlex that we can use in the future, not because we are not happy with the product. The reviews on Teradata IntelliFlex point out that it is a very solid and efficient solution, but we are slightly worried about the cost.

The price and the pricing structure should be improved.

Two years ago, we had plans to move into the cloud since we were doing so with all the products we have in our company to avoid having our own data centers. When we tried to move Teradata IntelliFlex to the cloud this year, we noticed that at this point in time, we might have to stay on-premises for a couple of years or until Teradata provides us with a better price structure. Owing to the aforementioned reasons, we have been considering moving to another more flexible platform and more price convenient for our company.

We are happy with the services provided by Teradata IntelliFlex.

At this point, it's worth looking at other alternatives other than Teradata IntelliFlex, depending on the kind of use you plan to do with the platform. There are certain areas of our company where we have noticed that we could get the same benefits from another platform, especially from the ones which are not pricey. If you really want to take advantage of the wonderful performance and speed that Teradata provides, then you need to choose it. But if you don't need the level of performance offered by Teradata, you can look for other alternatives. 

Overall, I rate the tool a nine out of ten.

We use Teradata IntelliFlex for data warehousing, which is a way of presenting data for faster retrieval.

The solution's banking model, called FSLDM (Financial Services Logical Data Model), is sophisticated and good.

The solution’s pricing, scalability, and technical support response time could be improved.

I have been using Teradata IntelliFlex for one year.

Teradata IntelliFlex is a stable solution.

Since the solution is limited to its hardware, it has issues and limitations about scalability. Around 100 users are extensively using the solution in our organization.

The solution's technical support team is supportive but takes two to three days to respond.

Teradata IntelliFlex comes with hardware that is already deployed and preconfigured.

You purchase, deliver, and install the hardware and software to deploy the solution. People from Teradata will configure the software for you, and it will be ready.

Teradata IntelliFlex provides a lot of value to our organization.

Users have to pay a yearly licensing fee for Teradata IntelliFlex, which is very expensive.

Before choosing Teradata IntelliFlex, we evaluated other options like SQL Server and Oracle. We chose Teradata IntelliFlex because of its core competitive advantage in terms of a readymade model for the financial sector.

All analytics and reporting in our organization are done through the solution. Two people are required to maintain and operate the solution. We need five data modelers to design and develop the solution.

I advise users not to get stuck with the solution since it's expensive. The change on this platform is also expensive since it has so many associations with other layers. Currently, the new architecture for the data is to eliminate its complexity because it's a complex solution.

Overall, I rate Teradata IntelliFlex a seven out of ten.

Teradata was mostly a control system for us where we were fetching the data from it on basic time intervals, on various DVs and various schema where we had to fetch the data. Reading was the main operation that we used Teradata for, but while reading, there were complex ENTs that we had to write because of a few data that was supposed to be transformed and then fetched, so that was the major use case for the solution.

There are several features of Teradata that I like. One of the most basic is the indexes. I also like that it provides lower TCO. It also has the optimizer feature which is a good feature and isn't found in other legacy systems. Parallelism is also another feature I like in Teradata because when you are running or hosting on multiple systems, you have this shared-nothing architecture that helps. Loading and unloading in Teradata are also really helpful compared to other systems.

Teradata is good, but eventually, my company is moving to a higher-level system. You wouldn't want to work on a lower-level system.

As for the areas for improvement in Teradata, since I was working on the very basic, legacy systems, the memory thing was always a challenge. If Teradata is moving to the cloud, the space constraint or the memory issue that my company generally faces will eventually resolve, in time.

What I'd like to see in the next release of Teradata is that it becomes full-fledged on the cloud, apart from better connectivity to various systems. For example, if I have to read or include a Python script, if I write some basic codes, I should be able to read even unstructured data. I know that it's not supported even in Snowflake, but at least semi-structured data support, if that can be a little more enhanced, that would be good.

I've been using Teradata for a year and a half now, and I'm using its latest version.

In terms of stability, Teradata is stable. All legacy systems are quite stable and do not have that much downtime, probably because no one would work with a system that is not stable.

Teradata is scalable, but it takes time because you have to increase the servers. On the legacy system, it's the physical servers that you increase and that takes time.

I don't have experience with Teradata technical support, because the client handles the maintenance. It's the client who reaches out to the technical support team in case there's a need to increase service on the Teradata system, or if there's any downtime or any glitches in terms of catching or loading the data, but that doesn't happen often.

Setting up Teradata took time. The server has to be set up and that takes time. Next, the IDs need to be set up and the role level security that the legacy system provides is definitely not up to the mark when compared to the cloud, so that is a concern. I'm talking truly about the legacy system. I haven't worked on the cloud part of it. It took more time to deploy Teradata.

Deploying the solution from dev to the QA environment, for example, creating tables, then copying over the data, are completed within twenty four to forty eight hours. It's the timeframe the DBA used to give, which is pretty high. With the closing features that we have normally, that would be a long time.

Implementation was taken care of by the client.

Teradata pricing is fine, and it's competitive with all the legacy models. On a scale of one to five, with one being the worst and five being the best, I'm giving Teradata a three, because it can be a little expensive, when compared to other solutions.

Teradata requires maintenance, but the team in charge of the maintenance was not in-house. It was taken care of by an external support team. There are forty to fifty users of the solution in the company. I'm use Teradata on a daily basis.

I'm rating Teradata an eight out of ten.

Our primary use case for Teradata is as a data warehouse; we store our databases for the data warehouse, including the EDW. It is mainly used for our data warehouse environment where we run a lot of analytics and heavy queries.

The solution provides good performance for our analytics queries. Due to the capacity of the Teradata warehouse, our queries are well performed.

The data mover is valuable over the last two years as it allows us to achieve data replication to our disaster recovery systems. We use the Teradata mover utility, which is presently valuable.

Replication needs improvement because we currently use DataMover once daily. Unlike SQL and Oracle, which have in-built replication capabilities, we don't have similar functionality with Teradata. 

Additionally, when backups are performed, it locks the database, preventing user access, which is a concern. Also, we need extra servers to perform backups, unlike SQL, which has embedded backup capabilities.

I have been working with Teradata for the last four years.

I find the stability to be almost a ten out of ten. It is very stable in our experience.

Scalability is complex as you need to purchase a license and coordinate with Teradata for additional disk space and CPU. They enable a small percentage for scaling, which isn't straightforward.

Customer support is very good, rated eight out of ten under our essential agreement, although it depends on the license agreements.

Positive

We also use SQL and Oracle. Teradata is much more expensive, however, it was already in place at our company.

The setup process is complex. Teradata installed and configured the systems.

We used Teradata's services for installation and configuration.

The pricing is quite high. It's a two out of ten where one is very high priced. Teradata is much more expensive than SQL, which is well-performed and cheaper.

I prefer SQL for its cost-effectiveness and performance and also consider Oracle, although its licensing is more expensive. Teradata was already present when I joined the company.

For Teradata to perform well, it requires good configuration and a good structure of the database. It's most suitable for medium and above-sized companies rather than small ones.

I'd rate the solution seven out of ten.

We'd done a lot of replacements of sites. We've installed new systems with Unity support. We installed and deployed around about five systems for a bank in South Africa. When the old Teradata equipment became obsolete, we replaced them with new ones. 

I was involved with the whole thing from start to end. You can't just upgrade Teradata. You have to see if all of the other stuff is compatible with the new site. 

The most valuable feature of Teradata was actually the fact that it controls everything on a database. It's very, very fast. The way that it operates, the way it was designed, is quick. Not one other system, even IBM, is working on the principle of how Teradata is working. Teradata system is like a multiprocessor. In an IBM system, if you send him a query, the one CPU will handle it, and it will do the query and it'll send it out again. With Teradata, if the one query is coming in, you've got 12 CPUs and 20 hard drives; that query will be handled, at the same time, by the 12 CPUs and the 20 hard drives to store and subtract the information. It's just a totally different way how Teradata is working, and due to that, the performance of Teradata is extraordinary. There is no other system in the world that compares to it.

The setup is not straightforward.

I would like Teradata to get involved in South Africa. They aren't doing aggressive promotion of Teradata systems in South Africa. They really should.

I was dealing with the solution for 12 years. 

I was doing professional services for them. They call it PS, and I've done customer services support for them, for the hardware and software support CS for 12 years, and as we grow, that time when I started, we were quite small and as the time we're growing, we are getting more persons on board.

The stability is excellent except for Unity. That time when Unity was installed, if it was running on passive routing, it was fine; however, if you're running on active, there was still some problem with the software. We've tried to put it on active routing every time we experience major problems with the software. When that happens, we must go back to passive routing again. When I spoke to someone the other day, they said there's a new app now. They're going to shut down Unity. There's some other application they're going to install now. They're not going to continue with Unity anymore, and that's not being sold to clients anywhere worldwide. However, there was definitely a bug in the software. As we were installing Unity, there were always coming new releases out, and we had to upgrade, and even with the upgrades, it still gave us problems. It became better, yet it wasn't ever 100% successful.

Otherwise, with the other systems, for all our other clients, the 12 years I worked for them, I had maybe eight or nine P1 calls, meaning that the system was down. The system is very stable, except when we started to fill Unity for the bank. Then we had a lot of P1 calls caused by Unity.

For the Unity side, we've had issues. Otherwise, with the other systems, for all our other clients, the 12 years I worked for them, I had maybe eight or nine P1 calls, meaning that the system was down. The system is very, very stable, except when we started to fill Unity for the bank. Then we had a lot of P1 calls caused by Unity.

We had 120 people in our organization working with the solution. However, our clients, depending on which account, could have thousands of users. 

We get excellent, excellent support from Teradata. I had a good relationship with Teradata. I know all the guys quite well. We get excellent support. I can always phone them as well. Even if you log the call as the process from Teradata, if they tell you they will respond in so many hours on a P1, P2, or P3, it always happens when they say it will. It's not that I had to escalate something. However, they've been great overall. 

Positive

It's not straightforward. You must know what you're doing. If you don't feed the data in correctly, it's read like bad data, bad performance. We've seen a couple of times where we've done an investigation to understand why some of the queries are slow, and then we found out that the programmers made a mistake in the way that they've created the data or the query and that was causing the problems on Teradata. 

We've seen this a couple of times. You can't be an IBM person and think you can become a programmer for Teradata. It's two different systems, and we've seen it several times. You have to know what you're doing when you do it, especially on the analytics side of Teradata.

To deploy Teradata, it takes a lot of pre-planning. It can take anywhere from two to four months. It all depends. There's a lot of stuff, actually, for the pre-planning phase, and that's one of the most important things. You have to do a lot of homework before you actually replace the system or you migrate the system. There's lots of planning that you have to put in place before you do that. YOu need a minimum of two to four months.

For the customer CS support for the hardware and software support, we had around about six engineers that were supporting all six systems and we had three people off-site.

Here in South Africa, we didn't use consultants. Sometimes, if we don't come right, we will log a call with Teradata and ask them to help us. That said, all of the upgrades and everything we've done it on our own without any problems. We had some performance problems on the systems at the bank and then we got Teradata to assist, which they helped resolve.

They've got various licenses. We would ensure that clients have all the licenses and everything for all the systems rolled out. That was part of the deal when we sold our system to Teradata. In the new system, subscriptions ensured everything was covered, or most everything was covered. The only thing we brought into the subscription side was the hardware and software support were separate. In the old days, you had to take the node support, hardware and software local, and the subscription and the bar support. With the latest models we sold, you just had the local support which you brought in and the subscription. 

I was the national service support manager for Teradata South Africa. I was in charge of all the sites in South Africa, Gauteng, and Cape Town. I was in charge of all the support services for Teradata.

I'd recommend the solution to other organizations. 

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten. It's one of the best systems in the world. 

Aster Teradata is mostly being used for doing mapping and I use it for analytics. Usually, there is a support vendor who will use Teradata to do the database analytics. But sometimes with Teradata, the DB administrators use it to get access to the libraries or the data processes.  

I mostly recommend Teradata for data storage because it is easy to deploy and implement.  

The most useful features are the base product functionality of data storage and analytics. The ease of deployment is also useful so clients are implemented quickly.   

I think that a couple of things can be improved with this product. One is, of course, that there should be an option for using it on the Cloud. A lot of customers ask me how they can get up and running fast, and this would be the fastest way with the least client effort. I know Teradata already has its own Cloud solution, but I think that is one area that needs more maturation and exploration. We need to do more testing before we begin to recommend it to clients and we can do this because we work directly with Teradata. We are using the Cloud solution and it is more scalable and also the costs are fairly elastic. It should be something we are using more with clients in the future.  

At an organization level, I think sometimes the support for development is not forthcoming. It should become more of a part of their ongoing process. If they dedicate more resources to developing along with the latest trends in the industry, Teradata could then bring that functionality out for the current customers and maybe attract other customers as well.  

I would say that the company should consider more capabilities in handling unstructured data in a better way. Right now most of the latest solutions that are coming to the market address the need for how to take unstructured data and create a standard map for that. I think that would really help. Right now, I only see most of the data through Teradata with its unstructured processing and some of it is not available. They can do more with this. I think Teradata's mappings are good and very easy to use. I would use it for customer databases as it is. But there still some ways that the handling of unstructured data could be improved and that would really help.  

I've been doing technical solutions for data integration for 22 years. We have a relationship with Teradata for 11 years — since 2008. We implement solutions and have a lot of experience with this product.  

My team has had the opportunity to work with technical support. I think it is fair to rate their services as a three-out-of-five. I think they are somewhat above average.  

I think the team has been very happy with the setup of Teradata from the system side.  

It is taking about a week for deployment. To sort out the clients' needs on the level of technical reports and the results usually takes about two weeks. That is in addition to creating the data warehouse and loading the data.  

The feedback I get from customers is the cost is high for what they get. In many cases, another product — other than Teradata — could be better for our clients cost-wise. This is why we are continuing to explore options to see if there are other, more cost-effective solutions. That is an area of the product from Teradata that they need to evaluate.  

Teradata has all the best features currently, but I think right now the market is really flooding with multiple options. Many customers have a need for rapid on-premise deployment. I think in that case I would recommend Teradata. But for smaller or medium-sized companies, there are probably other options out there that they might use instead which will fit better for their budget.  

On a scale from one to ten where one is the worst and ten is the best, I would rate Aster Data MapReduce (Teradata) overall as maybe six or seven probably. Seven-out-of-ten.  

To improve that rating, I think we see that our customers have a lot of unstructured data. So in addressing that in a better way, Teradata would become an eight. It could possibly resolve this in a simple way with better integration in working directly with other solutions that are already available out there. This may be the best solution for that.