Teradata Reviews

Primarily, Teradata is a traditional data warehouse, but we also encourage our customers to adapt to the logical data warehouse and data lab.

The most valuable feature is the ability to be anywhere - Teradata can be deployed on-premise, on the cloud, or in a virtual machine, which means customers can move without having to create their architecture all over again.

Teradata's pricing is quite high compared to Redshift, Synapse, or GCP alternatives. In the next release, I would like Teradata to refine their Object Store to be more compatible with cloud environments.

I've been working with Teradata since 2014.

Teradata's stability is very strong, and our customers feel their data is safe with it.

Teradata's scalability is good, it takes only the push of a button to scale up, and if that's not enough, you could scale with the cloud or a virtual machine.

The initial setup is straightforward if you have some knowledge about the logic of the environment. However, for those without knowledge, there will be a learning curve to understand how to use the solution.

Our customers say that Teradata makes them faster, smarter, and capable of more sophisticated analytics.

For anyone thinking of implementing Teradata, I would recommend preparing by understanding the technology and putting in the effort to keep it being adaptive to different and urgent requirements from your business. I would give Teradata a score of ten out of ten.

As a contractor for various companies working in various industries, we usually find Teradata in financial organizations. It is often being used for relational data storage for huge data warehouses (usually built on Inmon principles) or as storage for building analytical data marts. Teradata is positioned as a high-performance solution for heavy analytical queries and, in fact, it is. Moreover, Teradata is typically supplied with the whole ecosystem of its tools (like Viewpoint), but I have not extensively used them.

• Cuts time to process huge amounts of data with analytical queries
• A conventional and easily defined way to build a data warehouse or a layer of data marts
• Better development time - Teradata can be easily used in ETL mode transformations, so there is no need for expensive and inconvenient ETL tools

Efficiency of running analytical queries. Teradata was mainly invented for that purpose and it really does it well. We were able to migrate the code from SAS analytical platforms to pure Teradata and got an order of magnitude of performance growth (taking into account that the hardware was similar).

Query language and its functionality are rather limited, compared to Oracle or even SQL Server. However, it is possible to perform any kind of logic in it (though some workarounds may be required).

Data ingestion is done via external utilities and not by the query language itself. It would be more convenient to have that functionality within its SQL dialect.

We have not experienced any stability issues.

No. Teradata is positioned as a rather scalable system, and we have not seen any issues with it.

I was not impressed by tech support. We made several requests regarding performance issues we had with our applications but did not get helpful answers.

It is hard to say what our clients had been using before. It is safe to say that this was their first option for analytical data warehouse implementation.

I cannot say for sure. We have not taken part in deployment activities. As it is an appliance, I expect it is a bit complex.

Price is quite high, so if it is really possible to use other solutions (e.g. you do not have strict requirements for performance and huge data volumes), it might be better to look at alternatives from the RDBMS world.

Usual alternatives in the same segment for our clients are Oracle Exadata, SAP HANA, and Hadoop.

I rate it an eight out of 10. It is definitely the best RDBMS I have ever worked with, in the sense of building a data warehouse. It is fast, and easy to use in terms of writing queries. However, you have to understand the specifics of the data storage and its technical architecture, which is not typical for an RDBMS.

In terms of advice, I would suggest your provide training for your personnel, because it is rather important to understand the technical specifics of Teradata to create efficient solutions with it. Other RDBMS's usually requires knowledge  of generic theory, but that will not work with Teradata.

It is a solid database a lot of different tools to move data.

Basically, Teradata has allowed the multiple businesses that I have consulted for to build and store their Data Warehouse related data efficiently. It also serves up the data quickly, if tuned and organized properly.

Cost, but Teradata is currently making improvements in this area.

Nine years.

Most of the organizations that I have consulted with have a 99.9% up time. The product is very stable.

Teradata is great as far as scalability once you have the product. You can move space on the fly. However, adding additional space once your disks are full in the past was expensive. I believe that they are addressing this issue by allowing you to buy only the hardware (disk space, node, amps) you need and not having to perform a total upgrade.

This depends on your service agreement. If you have tier 1 support, you are guaranteed to have full support at any moment.

I was not in a position as a consultant to make solution decisions.

I have never setup a Teradata box personally.

I am not in a position to share licensing costs.

I was not in a position as a consultant to make software solution decisions.

Get educated about the product.

We use it for enterprise data warehouse (EDW) with on-premise hardware. The company uses EDW for most MIS functions.

It has massive parallel processing ability to do large amounts of concurrent querying. It has given our business the ability to gain insights into the data and create data labs for analysis and PoCs.

Speed of complex queries and the ability to schedule give business users time to analyse data rather than waiting for queries to run.

We are using an older version at the moment. We are looking for a more flexible cost model for the next version that we use, whether it be cloud or on-premise.

I found all parts --loading, transformation, processing & querying work in parallel, and end-to-end-- to be valuable.

Vodafone Spain tried to migrate a very populated data mart platform from Sybase IQ to Oracle. Unfortunately, they failed at this job. But more than 20 Sybase IQ database engines (with their respective licence, support costs, etc.) were successfully integrated into one single Teradata ecosystem.

The cloud is the new challenge and the new opportunity.

I have designed Teradata EDWH solutions for more than 16 years.

I did not encounter any issues at all.

I did not encounter any issues at all.

I would rate the level of technical support 10/10.

I have previous experience with Oracle/Informix/Sybase. For large EDWH solutions, Teradata is the best. Oracle solutions are multipurpose oriented and Td is EDWH oriented from the beginning.

The initial cost may seem high, but the TCO is low.

I mainly evaluated Oracle.

I recommend starting with a clean and normalized business model that is capable of addressing business questions. Teratada (and its consultants) will do the rest.

Teradata is primarily for data warehousing at large customers, like banks, retailers, and government organizations. However, we don't use Teradata for Russian government organizations because it's a US tool, and the Russian government doesn't allow foreign software.

Teradata features high productivity and reliability because it has several redundancy options, so the system is always up and running. 

Teradata needs to expand the kind of training that's available to customers. Teradata only offers training directly and doesn't delegate to any third-party companies. As a result, it's harder to find people trained on Teradata in our market relative to Oracle.

They should diversify their sales channels and develop more resellers. Teradata could also be more active in marketing because I rarely see any Teradata events in Russia. They've always had several regional conferences for Teradata users, but I hardly ever see marketing events geared toward new customers.

I've been working with Teradata for 11 years.

One of Teradata's biggest advantages is that it's fully scalable

We usually don't have any problems with Teradata itself. However, sometimes customers have issues with applications they've written themselves that aren't adequately designed to fully utilize Teradata's capabilities.

I would not say the setup is too complex. Teradata has a direct sales model, so Teradata employees usually set it up with help from the customer because they don't support a big system of resellers or partners. It's pretty easy because they are actively involved in the deployment. But later on, when the customer is expanding the solution and doing many things themselves, they make mistakes, which should be corrected using the support resources of Teradata.

Teradata is expensive, so it's typically marketed to big customers. However, there have been some changes, and Teradata is now offering more flexible pricing models and equipment leasing. They've added pay-as-you-go and cloud models, so it's changing, but Teradata is generally known as an expensive high-end product.

I rate Teradata eight out of 10. Customers need a certain amount of knowledge to correctly use Teradata when running their applications on the platform. They should also keep in mind the requirements for Teradata's features.

We implement Teradata in financial sectors, which include banks in India and Canada.

Technically, it has made data processing much faster than other SMP databases.

The most valuable features are the Shared-nothing architecture and data protection functionality.

The user interface needs to be improved.

The price needs to be more competitive as Hadoop, Redshift, Snowflake, etc are constantly making way into EDW space.