Has improved automation and performance through parallel scripting but needs better AI integration and unstructured data support
What is our primary use case?
I have been using Teradata for more than one or two years.
My main use case for Teradata is creating tables, views, and procedures for our applications, along with creating BTEQ scripts to schedule some pipelines.
A specific example of how I use Teradata in one of my projects is for a large retail chain that wants to understand the customer's buying pattern across different regions to improve their store sales and inventory planning, where we have used Teradata for data integration, collecting data from multiple source systems such as POS systems, online transactions, and CRM, handling billions of transactions efficiently with advanced analytical queries.
What is most valuable?
BTEQ is the best feature of Teradata, as it allows me to execute multiple queries such as select, insert, update, and delete in a single script, handle errors, automate running multiple SQL statements, and schedule ETL jobs, making it lightweight and scriptable, unlike SQL Assistant.
Parallelism helps my team mainly for scripting and automation in projects; for instance, we utilize Teradata's parallel processing engine to execute queries across multiple model processors simultaneously, making data migration more efficient by splitting large datasets into smaller files and running multiple BTEQ scripts in a parallel fashion.
What needs improvement?
One challenge I have faced regarding the main use case is the integration with AI, as Teradata does not have the AI models that other OLAP systems such as BigQuery provide, making it difficult for us to give proper recommendations without using different tools for AI integration.
Teradata can be improved on the cloud side by integrating with some OLAP features and providing capabilities similar to Delta Lake for storing semi-structured, structured, and unstructured data.
I want to highlight two features for improvement: first, storing data in various formats without requiring a tabular structure, accommodating unstructured data; and second, adding AI ML features to better integrate Gen AI, LLM concepts, and user-friendly experiences such as text-to-SQL capabilities.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been working in my current field for almost more than four years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
Teradata is stable in my experience.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
Teradata's scalability is good.
How are customer service and support?
Teradata's customer support is good.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
I have not used any other solutions before Teradata.
How was the initial setup?
I purchased Teradata through the AWS marketplace and believe it would benefit from easier documentation for deployment, as it is somewhat complicated for new users.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing of Teradata is almost good, although the cost is slightly high, but they provide good features.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
Before choosing Teradata, we evaluated other options such as Databricks, which we preferred due to their strong AI ML features and options such as Delta Lake.
What other advice do I have?
My advice for others considering using Teradata is that if their use case involves daily transactions with commands such as insert, update, or delete, they should go ahead and use Teradata, as many companies in retail, CPG, and banking find it effective for those operations compared to other platforms. I rate this product 7.5 out of 10.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
Private Cloud
If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use?
Amazon Web Services (AWS)
Has enabled faster data processing and improved team productivity through multi-parallel query execution
What is our primary use case?
There are two major use cases for Teradata. One is that whatever data we cleanse and aggregate, we push it to Teradata for our business users. We create some ETL pipelines and automate them. The second use case is for data wrangling. Whatever data we publish to Teradata is used for various analyses, various SQLs, and a lot of dashboards sit on top of Teradata.
My most recent project was for inferring the Net Promoter Score for one of the largest Australian banks where I used Teradata for ETL and data analysis. The entire cleaned data of the bank was stored in Teradata, wherein we had eight to ten different datasets coming in from different sources that were aggregated or converged into Teradata. Using that data, we developed certain business rules on top of that aggregated dataset, which was further fed into Tableau that sat on top of Teradata. Using that data, we were able to infer the customer Net Promoter Score for a rolling six-week average.
What is most valuable?
The first thing that I appreciate about Teradata is its multi-parallel processing. Whatever queries we execute on Teradata, they are blazingly fast, so it offers really fast connectivity. Secondly, it also provides the MultiLoad feature, by which I can upload my Excels directly to Teradata or CSVs to analyze the data. The third feature is the QUALIFY or ROW_NUMBER keywords that I really appreciate about Teradata. The fourth thing is the way Teradata stores data in a columnar format for faster query processing, which is also one of the best features.
The multi-parallel processing and fast query execution of Teradata have benefited me and my team greatly. What really happens is that we store multiple copies of the data, one in Teradata and the other in our HDFS or object storage. When we had to query the data from the object storage, it was really slow, but when we discovered that this dataset is also available in Teradata, it was really fast, especially related to the NPS project that I was discussing. That is probably one of the use cases that I can recall.
Teradata has positively impacted my organization since its inception. Earlier, whatever data we used to house was in HDFS, then we migrated to cloud, and now we are using Teradata, but Teradata has also moved to cloud. Teradata has immensely helped our organization to fetch the data at a faster rate, which has saved us quite a lot of time. That is probably the very best thing about Teradata.
What needs improvement?
Teradata could be improved by having a web interface that can really help users to plug and play. Right now, what is required is that I have to install a desktop app for Teradata and then set up the connections. If the same thing were available in a web interface, that would be really helpful.
For how long have I used the solution?
Since I started my career, I have been using Teradata. It has been more than seven years that I have been using Teradata.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
The scalability of Teradata is really great. Whenever we need more resources, we can add that in Teradata, and when not needed, we can scale it down as well. All in all, it is very good.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
I have not used other solutions personally, but I have seen a use case of Redshift getting used earlier in my current organization. I have also seen the use of object storage prior to using Teradata fully. What I can see now is that we are moving away from object storage because we want faster results, which is why we use Teradata.
What was our ROI?
I have seen a return on investment through time saved, specifically saving fifteen to twenty percent of the time.
At least fifteen to twenty percent of our time has been saved using Teradata, which has positively affected team productivity and business outcomes.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
Before choosing Teradata, I evaluated other options such as Snowflake and Redshift. These were some of the options available.
What other advice do I have?
My advice to others looking into using Teradata is to go for it if you need faster processing, multi-parallel processing, or more security. I would rate this product an eight out of ten.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
Hybrid Cloud
If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use?
Has improved data quality, optimized reporting processes, and enabled predictive insights across business units
What is our primary use case?
My main use case for Teradata involves data analytics, data mapping, and data process improvement.
I use Teradata for our in-in processes such as revenue reporting. We have utilized it for procurement to pay and analyzed all the data points from procure to settlements to payments, ensuring that the right data has been sent, checking the data status, and guaranteeing the cleanliness and quality of the data.
We are using Teradata for generative AI related to data mapping, data content, and data distribution.
What is most valuable?
The best features that Teradata offers include the security around the data, which has been a key issue for us. Teradata locks down the data, providing us with a quality of data we can trust when sending it to external portals and third-party tools such as Salesforce.
Teradata's security helps our organization meet compliance requirements such as GDPR and IFRS, and it is particularly essential for revenue contracting or revenue recognition. Additionally, we rely on it due to our HIPAA requirements.
The analytics features and the dashboards in Teradata have been extremely helpful for us.
Teradata has positively impacted our organization by allowing our team to reduce from 27 people down to eight, consolidating our headcount. It has resulted in better performance improvement within our team as we now cover nine business units instead of 18, thanks to the data performance, which has increased data visibility and helped the enterprise achieve a higher rate of internal return on financials.
We have observed a lesser level of churn with our customers; we have been able to maintain more customer relationships because we have access to more data and analytics, allowing us to predict customer needs anywhere from three to nine months ahead of time.
What needs improvement?
The limitation we encountered was related to speed, prompting us to increase our AWS cloud thresholds and benchmarks on the servers, adding more throughput. We have been testing that, but speed remains one of our key issues.
The integration has been awesome because of the platforms and their usage, and usability is great. The most challenging aspect is finding Teradata resources, so we are focusing on internal training and looking for more Teradata experts. If Teradata could provide a list of certified experts, that would be fantastic.
I rated Teradata a nine because the main area for improvement is the bandwidth of resources that could assist us in applying to our projects, specifically more certified and expert resources. The market share of Teradata professionals is limited, creating an issue for us.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using Teradata for 12 years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
Teradata's scalability is great; it's been awesome.
How are customer service and support?
The customer support for Teradata has been great.
I would rate the customer support a nine on a scale of 1 to 10.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
I previously used Oracle Data Store, but we switched due to problems with integration, speed to market, talent, and security issues.
What was our ROI?
We have realized a return on investment, with a reduction of staff from 27 to eight, and our current return on investment is approximately 14%. Our target is a 30% internal rate of return. Overall, our performance improvement and KPIs have increased by about 22%, but we are aiming for another 17% to capture in synergy dollars.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
Our experience with pricing included a staged pricing model based on units and servers, the cost per subscription, and the data usage, which involved about five different points in our pricing model. We spent roughly $295,000 on setup costs, and we have a five-year license.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
Before choosing Teradata, we evaluated several options, including Snowflake, Teradata, Oracle Data Store, SAP MDM, and two other products whose names I don't remember.
What other advice do I have?
My advice for others looking into using Teradata is to conduct co-pilot type projects first; I recommend executing use case projects to truly see the value and understand how much it helps.
We are just a customer and do not have any other business relationship with this vendor.
On a scale of one to ten, I rate Teradata a nine.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
Public Cloud
If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use?
It helps us with connectivity and making sure the data is secure
We have all our workloads on AWS.
How has it helped my organization?
Having Teradata in AWS:
* Helps us with connectivity.
* Making sure the data is secure.
* Reduces the hops.
* Helps us more with real-time data.
We had few reports which were taking more than 45 minutes. Then, with Teradata, we received results within minutes, and a few under a minute. We thought that something went wrong, and we hadn't done the work properly, but we saw the exact same results on both. So, our end users were pretty happy.
What is most valuable?
It is quick, secure, and has less hassles because we don't have to involve our networking team, infrastructure, etc. It is very easy to deploy and make market ready.
What needs improvement?
Teradata wants to come out of the hardware business and to run its own cloud on other public clouds. I think that is a great way to go. However, there are challenges to doing this. There are multiple layers of security and caching. E.g., if you have a lot of compute or a caching that will offload a lot of compute activity because it's already there, it will save its cycles for something which needs to be done. This way, you are offloading your compute, so you can go with a lesser capacity than a higher capacity. That is what this appliance does. If they are moving off of the appliance, I am curious to see if their software will withstand the change, or will Teradata still run but need a bigger box?
I would like more security and speed. These days, everyone is not just moving to cloud, but they are moving to clout. In a multi-cloud environment, you have to be cognizant of data transfer, bandwidth, and egress charges, not just from a performance and scalability point of view, but also how to keep costs low.
For how long have I used the solution?
One to three years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
We haven't had any outages in one and a half years. That is a good statement.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
I have not heard anyone complain about performance.
How is customer service and technical support?
The technical support is pretty good. The response rate is good.
Which solutions did we use previously?
We had a bunch of legacy warehouses, which we wanted to consolidate, as well as stay up-to-date with warehousing options. This is why we moved into Teradata.
How was the initial setup?
The integration and configuration were seamless for us.
We have multiple sources of data, so Teradata has a lot of connectors which pulls all our data from different workloads. The integration works really well.
What about the implementation team?
We had help with the integration and configuration.
What was our ROI?
When your customer is happy, dollars and cents sort of blur. Our return on investment would be customer satisfaction, which I think is priceless.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
We had a lot of parties involved when purchasing from the AWS Marketplace. They are very flexible and aggressive in trying to close the deal. They are good at what they have to offer and listening to the customer. It's a two-way street.
In this day and age, we want to get things done quickly. So, we go to the AWS Marketplace.
Also, we have a consistent experience with Teradata usage on its cloud, so we already know the product.
For what Teradata has to offer, their price is comparable to its competitors.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
We evaluated Redis and Teredata, doing PoCs with both. We had more support from Teradata to start with, and we were new to both. We were not in a situation to tell which one was good, because both were new to us. We just had more support from Teradata to help us see the results on what we are looking for.
What other advice do I have?
Do your homework before you make a decision. Everyone is different; every shop is different. That is what makes it fun to be in IT.
When you look for a solution, you will uncover many advantages. All those hidden things which are not clear initially when you do a cost analysis. A cost analysis is something that you have to do from the get-go, but it also has to be an ongoing process. Your workloads change, requirements change, everything changes, so it has to be a constant feedback.
It was easy for us to migrate from on-premise Teradata to AWS Teradata
We have been using the on-premise PostgreSQL, and most of our data comes from SAP. We have all our Oracle logs being pushed to Teradata, which is where we take the data, then skim it. We pass it through whatever it is we are using, then turn it back to the customers.
Therefore, our primary use case is to distribute the data across all types of commercial and personal consumers, making it available as fast as possible.
How has it helped my organization?
We are able to distribute Teradata in different regions to increase availability. As we are slowly moving everything to AWS cloud, we haven't had to worry about anything.
What is most valuable?
I like writing preformance queries for preprocessing on AWS Cloud.
What needs improvement?
I would like more security and speed. These days, everyone is not just moving to cloud, but they are moving to clout. In a multi-cloud environment, you have to be cognizant of data transfer, bandwidth, and egress charges, not just from a performance and scalability point of view, but also how to keep costs low.
For how long have I used the solution?
One to three years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
The stability is fine. We did not see a lot of downtime while migrating. It was a pretty clean transfer from on-premise to the cloud.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
The scalability is great. AWS is all about the scalability.
How is customer service and technical support?
I have not used the technical support.
Which solutions did we use previously?
Since we also use the AWS PostgreSQL, and some of our data is in there too, we came to the conclusion to move solutions within Teradata. Because already had the on-premise Teradata, it was easy for us to migrate from on-premise Teradata to AWS Teradata.
How was the initial setup?
The integration and configuration of Teradata in our AWS environment was great. This lead us to use all the databases after making the move to AWS Cloud in Teradata.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
I don't know about the pricing and licensing.
What other advice do I have?
Initially, the whole infrastructure was on-premise. For the past year, we have started moving over to the cloud. The support that we receive from AWS is great.
