Teradata introduces first in-memory technology that supports big data deployments

Teradata has introduced Teradata Intelligent Memory™, an innovative database technology.

Teradata Intelligent Memory™ creates the industry’s first extended memory space beyond cache that significantly increases query performance and enables organisations to leverage in-memory technologies with big, diverse data.

Teradata’s innovations help results-oriented organisations use all their data to know more about their customers and business – so they can do more to drive profitability.

“The introduction of Teradata Intelligent Memory allows our customers to exploit the performance of memory within Teradata Platforms in a new way and extends our leadership position as the best performing data warehouse technology at the most competitive price,” said Scott Gnau, president, Teradata Labs.

“Teradata Intelligent Memory technology is built into the data warehouse and customers don’t have to buy a separate appliance. Additionally, Teradata enables its customers to configure the exact amount of in-memory capability needed for critical workloads. It can be difficult, expensive and impractical to keep all data in memory; Teradata’s unique approach means the right amount of memory can be applied to the right set of data for blinding performance – automatically.”

Teradata Intelligent Memory is another best-of-breed solution that fits into the overall Unified Data Architecture strategy, which leverages Teradata, Teradata Aster and open source Apache™ Hadoop. Data in Apache Hadoop that is frequently used can be accessed through Teradata SQL-H and, based on temperature of the data, moved to Intelligent Memory to take advantage of its high performance computing capability.

Some organisations have opted to store all data in memory to speed answers to queries, but the cost is prohibitive and there are limits on memory capacity, which is important with the volumes of big, diverse data needed for analysis.

Teradata Intelligent Memory manages the data in this new space by predictively placing the very hottest or most frequently used data into memory, then automatically updating and synchronising it. The process doesn’t need any human intervention.

Teradata Intelligent Memory never requires that changes be made to applications, SQL queries, or how the data is stored. Teradata offers customers the benefits of data analytics on data in-memory. Access to data in-memory eliminates disk I/O bottlenecks and query delays and increases system throughput. Access to data in-memory is three orders of magnitude faster than access to hard disk drives.

Teradata Intelligent Memory is available for any of the current Teradata workload-specific platforms running the Teradata Database. For organisations looking for departmental solutions, Integrated Data Warehouse or Active Data Warehouse, Teradata Intelligent Memory delivers the performance required to deliver analytics to drive competitive advantage.

Teradata Intelligent Memory uses sophisticated algorithms that automatically age, track and rank data to ensure effective data management and support for user queries. Inside Teradata Intelligent Memory, data can be stored and compressed in columns and rows, which maximises the amount of data in the memory space.

Teradata Intelligent Memory places only the very hottest data to the new extended memory space. Organisations benefit by being able to access the most current data quickly from system memory to satisfy the vast majority of their queries, which also achieves a better financial return on investment.
Organisations that are faced with heightened competition and economic conditions continue to demand more from their data warehouses to help make critical business decisions. There is a need to have as much data available as possible to broaden and deepen the analyses conducted by the business.

However, data warehouse performance is impacted by the rapid growth of data volume, complexity, variety, variability and the analytic applications that use the data. Database administrators cannot manually tune and adjust settings to accommodate every change in workload.

“Teradata’s new in-memory architecture is integrated with its management of data temperature,” said Richard Winter, chief executive officer, WinterCorp.

“This is very significant, because the hottest data will migrate automatically to the in-memory layer - Teradata Intelligent Memory; the next hottest data will move automatically to solid state disk; and, so on. Teradata also provides column storage and data compression that amplifies the value of data in memory. The customer sees increased performance without having to make decisions about which data is placed in memory.”

Teradata is the only vendor to take a comprehensive, systems-level approach to multi-temperature data management to ensure optimum performance to meet the extreme service level demands of business users.

To meet users’ demands, Teradata Intelligent Memory extends multi-temperature data management into the memory layer. It supplements other multi-temperature features including Teradata Virtual Storage which continuously migrates data to the appropriate level of storage, solid state drive (SSD) and hard disk drive (HDD) technology, based on its to achieve optimum data warehouse performance.

Teradata Virtual Storage provides an automated lifecycle management process where “cold” or the least used data is migrated to less expensive drives. In addition, when data is identified as “cold,” or the least used, the Teradata compress-on-cold feature automatically compresses the data to deliver dramatic space savings.

This process eliminates the frequent compression and decompression of hot data, is effortless for customers and provides a significant increase in the amount of data stored. When user data is highly compressed and it is transferred to the new memory space, Teradata Intelligent Memory is able to further maximise the amount of data in the memory space.

Teradata Intelligent Memory will be available as part of Teradata Database 14.10 for release in the second quarter of 2013.