Re: Teradata vs Oracle

I have experience with both machines so I will try to speak to a few of the differences.

Teradata has only had triggers for a few years and a procedure language for less than that. If you have any intention of writing code inside the database or creating applications Oracle blows Teradata away. Teradata has always had interfaces for proprietary langauges and C but the learning curve is huge to use them effectively and they can not be leveraged on your resume into anything other than another Teradata job. The SQL you use against Teradata can be picked up by an Oracle developer in a few days with the major difference being that Teradata uses the ANSI outer-join syntax Oracle has now added to 9i.

But if the intention is to just create a huge data container to be queried for reports and statistical analysis I would go with Teradata. And, BTW, you can install Oracle on a Teradata machine in addition to the Teradata database that comes with it and Oracle sells a Transparent Gateway for connecting the two different products.

One nice thing about the Teradata architecture, in addition to it being MPP (massive parallel processing) is the way it uses cursors. When a new query is going after the same data as an existing query ... it doesn't open up a new cursor and start at the top ... it piggybacks onto an existing cursor and just keeps going.

You don't mention how much data you have. If it isn't in the middle-to-high hundreds of gigabytes ... your CIO is probably just looking to repeat something he did somewhere else without a careful consideration of the operating costs. It is damnably difficult to find good Teradata people (not many of them) and expensive to train new ones. Here in Washington State, to the best of my knowledge there are only three companies that own these machines which should give you an idea of how small the talent pool is (Boeing, AT&T Wireless, and Nordstrom).

Daniel Morgan

1443131_at_usenetplanet.com wrote:

> I am not familiar with Teradata at all. We have a bunch of Oracle
> databases currently, but our new CIO wants build all the new data
> warehouses using Teradata, not Oracle. It will probably be three
> terabytes in size.
>
> It is my understanding that he is the only person who wants to use
> Teradata instead of Oracle, but he is the "CIO" and he has the final
> say. What is advantage of Teradata over Oracle? Is it cost
> effective? Would it work better than Oracle? Why would anyone build
> data warehouse using Teradata instead of Oracle? Thank you in
> advance.
Received on Tue Feb 19 2002 - 12:17:12 CST