Teradata - Architecture of Teradata

Editor's Notes

• #5: [Enter any extra notes here; leave the item ID line at the bottom] Avitage Item ID: {{E3648B2F-FB1B-499B-B91B-8871943BA5EE}}
• #15: Retail Fraud is a $16 B year problem in the USA alone. With web receipts and better copying capabilities, thieves can make multiple copies of a single receipt and make multiple returns for cash or other merchandise. Or they can bring back shoplifted items and try to exchange for cash. The problem is that often the associates in Returns department don’t have access to past sales information and can’t keep track easily of returned merchandise. This is especially problematic if the policy is to make returns without receipts. So the solution is straightforward: hook up the Point of Sale systems so within seconds, the Teradata data warehouse is updated with sales, return, exchange, and void data, and provide the Returns department with the entire history of purchases by that customer,, so they can ensure that a sold product can only be returned once. <Click> The impact? Huge, according to one Teradata customer who has already built this system. They stopped a crime ring in the first day of their rollout, a group that had defrauded the company of thousands of dollars. They saw a 100% payback on their investment in just 5 months, and continue to reap the benefits of this example use of Active Enterprise Intelligence.
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• #25: (CLICK) In this chart, we have 3 different disk drive sizes, and you can see that per generation, disk drive bandwidth hasn’t increased very much. (CLICK) As disk capacities get larger (36 GB  73 GB  146 GB) the performance per capacity ratio (Capacity vs. Disk Bandwidth on right side of chart) declines significantly. The key metric on this slide is performance per capacity (MB/ SEC/ GB) Look at this slide! Capacity is doubling, but throughput is diminishing! If you fill all the drives up with data, you will not have enough I/O or bandwidth! Choosing twice as much storage capacity in a configuration, but not increasing the number of physical disks (to keep I/O constant), will result in performance degradation.
• #29: Assuming workloads are categorized, this illustration shows “speed limits” which are actually resource limits for each workload. Each workload is allowed to consume a limited amount of resources at any given time to ensure other workloads get their rightful share. Dynamic Resource Prioritization Inside every fully utilized active data warehouse, there’s a major turf battle going on. Each job in the database is engaged in an ongoing struggle for more and more resources for its own work, often competing against other diverse activities. In most databases, these me-first conflicts result in short, resource-light queries falling victim to the heavier jobs. Those batch fraud-detection reports and long-running market share analysis queries essentially take ownership of the database and all it has to give. But Teradata Database lets your specific business needs determine how your precious database resources are divided. Once a definition for equitable sharing of database assets is in place, it automatically controls what percent of the CPU and disk I/O those batch reports and complex queries, as well as those vulnerable short queries, will receive. When there’s a handful of users on the system, Teradata Database spreads available resources out relative to the priorities and assignments that have been made to those particular users, without a single sub-second of CPU being wasted. Teradata Database has made job scheduling and prioritization of the work a core competency since 1988. And recently, that technology has deepened and matured offering even more flexibility. Teradata’s Priority Scheduler can be used to ensure that the event-driven work coming from the web is allowed to cut into line to grab the CPU it needs to get that promotion back to the client quickly. For example, if the tactical query that comes up with that promotion returns an answer in 1 second when running alone in the database, that same query, if armed with a high Teradata Database priority, can maintain a similar turnaround even if multiple complex inventory adjustment queries begin executing at the same time. For the active data warehouse, it will be critical to keep more resource-hungry complex queries from dominating the resources in the system, starving out the shorter tactical work. Teradata’s Dynamic Workload Manager will play a big role in enabling favored work to be as near to real time as it needs to be.
• #31: While no 2 dimensional drawing can accurately portray such complex issues, this graphic frames the discussion around when to move to mission critical and dual active solutions. In general, the type of users often correlates with the population of users. For example, we know that the consumer population for many industries can mean 10 of thousands to millions of possible users via the internet . Similarly, for some industries, the population of supplier employees who access your data warehouse can be enormous, maybe not always in concurrent users but certainly in potential users. At the other end of the spectrum, planning, analysis, and power users tend to be a small community albeit an influential one. In the middle of the graphic we see overlaps of many kinds because line managers (category managers, sales managers, service managers, etc.) often bounce between strategic decisio0ns and operational decisions, with probably more time spent in the operational tasks. Business critical is not a well defined term in our industry. It tends to mean anything less than mission critical. These users can often tolerate downtime, from a few hours perhaps even an entire day. But many data warehouse sites have become so dependent on the EDW, that they have “hardened” the server, software, and procedures to a mission critical level. This means the executives realize how many decisions are made daily based on BI Tools based reporting that they are willing to fund the project to increase system availability. Mission critical can begin in the EDW and certainly extends all the way to the end of the graphic. These clients understand that large populations of front line users will demand 24X7 data availability. With operational employees you MIGHT be able to tolerate a 10-20 minute outage every month. It depends very much on the business use of the EDW. As the EDW evolves to larger populations and more operational ACTIVE tasks, outrages become increasingly expensive so additional investments in availability become mandatory. In some cases, an active data warehouse begins being so critical to the operational employee that it becomes necessary to step up to a dual active configuration. This is particularly true in retail with 100s of concurrent employees and suppliers using the data, but it may also occur with large call centers or sales staff. Finally, we hope it is obvious that when consumers gain access to the data warehouse, it is typically for eCommerce purchasing. No downtime is tolerated in this case because the loss of revenue cannot be tolerated.
• #33: Problem: Lack of ability to track customer gaming behavior and Comp redemption. No mechanism to communicate or react to specific behaviors and trends Solution: Player Contact System - when a patron swipes his/her card at a casino that information is sent to Teradata. The player profile is accessed and it is determined if the casino should make personal contact with that player. Allows Harrah’s to provide real-time offers to customers at each gaming point Enables Harrah’s to track the redemption of any comp provided to a guest as the comp is redeemed or partially redeemed. Allows them not to “over-comp” guests. Future: “Marketing At The Slots” initiative. This implementation has a BusinessWorks process receiving inbound card-swipes from the Slot Data System and building an EDW query. It then makes a Request/Reply call to Teradata to solicit and compile an XML message which is then published back out on the TIB for consumption by other applications. This will drive CRM to a new “real-time” level allowing interaction with the customer while they are gaming.
• #34: Problem: Lack of ability to track customer gaming behavior and Comp redemption. No mechanism to communicate or react to specific behaviors and trends Solution: Player Contact System - when a patron swipes his/her card at a casino that information is sent to Teradata. The player profile is accessed and it is determined if the casino should make personal contact with that player. Allows Harrah’s to provide real-time offers to customers at each gaming point Enables Harrah’s to track the redemption of any comp provided to a guest as the comp is redeemed or partially redeemed. Allows them not to “over-comp” guests. Future: “Marketing At The Slots” initiative. This implementation has a BusinessWorks process receiving inbound card-swipes from the Slot Data System and building an EDW query. It then makes a Request/Reply call to Teradata to solicit and compile an XML message which is then published back out on the TIB for consumption by other applications. This will drive CRM to a new “real-time” level allowing interaction with the customer while they are gaming.