30 Years In I.T. …You’d get Less for Murder!
A few weeks ago marked 30 years since yours truly started out as a graduate IT trainee at Royal Insurance (now RSA) in 1988. Back then, there were no PCs, just dumb terminals; no mobile phones, just landlines; no email, no internet. But the biggest shock of all: other people could smoke at your desk! […]
MPP & Redshift Musings
What On Earth is MPP? In computing, massively parallel refers to the use of a large number of processors (or separate computers) to perform a set of coordinated computations in parallel (simultaneously). Source: Wikipedia Teradata & MPP Beginnings Once upon a time, in a land far, far away…well, OK, California in the late 1970’s/early 1980’s […]
MPP & Cloud – Nothing New Under the Sun
MPP & Cloud – Nothing New Under the Sun The ‘shared nothing‘ or ‘massively parallel processing‘ (MPP) computing architecture is hardly new. The likes of Teradata, Netezza and Pivotal Greenplum have been offering MPP technology going back as far as the 1980’s (well, Teradata has, the others came along in the early 2000’s). Similarly, cloud […]
Data Warehouse Application Migration
The last 12 months or so has seen a lot of ‘Big Data’ POCs being initiated in our world. The most frequent objective from both the customer side and the Hadoop vendors that we talk to seems to be ‘data warehouse application migration’ or ‘offloading’. So what do we mean by ‘offloading’, why is it […]
Parallel Processing Supermarket Analogy
Do you know a better parallel processing analogy?
Teradata Spool 1.0.1
So you think you know about Teradata spool?
MapReduce, MPP and Big Data Discussion
There’s an interesting article discussing the relationship between the ‘old skool’ MPP approach to Big Data, and the ‘new-fangled’ MapReduce approach to Big Data over at ZDnet: http://www.zdnet.com/blog/big-data/mapreduce-and-mpp-two-sides-of-the-big-data-coin/121 We felt compelled to comment, naturally: “The central tenet that MapReduce and MPP have a lot in common is correct. From the user’s perspective, the main difference […]
Teradata Indexes – primary index (PI) deep dive
Whilst at the Teradata Partners 2011 show last October we bought several copies of a book on Teradata indexes called ‘Teradata Database Index Essentials’, written by Alison Torres of Teradata, no less. This book on Teradata indexes even has it’s own web site at http://www.teradataindexes.com/. So, predictably, we raced each other to read the Teradata […]
Teradata Appliance Musings
Some would suggest, quite reasonably, that Teradata has been an appliance ever since it’s birth in the 1980’s. I would tend to agree, sort of. Server, storage, OS, DBMS, cabinet…it’s all there pre-configured and ready to go. Isn’t it? Well, yes, but…there has always been quite a bit of latitude when choosing the spec of […]