It’s been quite some time since yours truly attended a Teradata event, especially as an invited guest. How nice of the Teradata folks.
Previous trips to Teradata Partners have been to Orlando, Washington DC, San Diego, Las Vegas & Seattle.
Nothing so exotic this time. The recent Teradata Possible 2024 event was held in ‘The Big Smoke’. Somewhat surprisingly it clashed with the Big Data London event, so I decided to split my time between the two.
The overly expensive train from Liddypool to London was as quick & uneventful as hoped. An ancient Oyster card even worked on the tube. Result!
Upon arrival, the first person I bumped into was my old chum & ex-colleague Alan Okell.
We first met at LloydsTSB in ‘sunny Wyth’ (Wythenshawe, Manchester) in 1997. As one of Alan’s mentors I’m claiming a little bit of credit for the Teradata legend he is today. He’s also the best footballer I’ve ever had the (dis)pleasure to play against. I claim zero credit there.
Immediately after Alan, I ran into another 1990s ex-LloydsTSB colleague. None other than Teradata’s own Mark ‘Dodgy’ Dodgson. It was great to have a long overdue catch up with Mark.
With no time wasted, Teradata’s James Perkins and I got chatting with the folks from Very.
Very is the latest incarnation of the merger of the Littlewoods and Great Universal Stores (GUS) retail businesses. Both trace their Teradata adoption back to the 1980s. This is one of the longest users of Teradata *ever* anywhere.
James is ex-Very so our paths have crossed several times. I was the tech lead when Littlewoods (now Very) built the Teradata ‘Zeus’ system that’s still in use over 20 years later. It runs ‘in the cloud’ these days.
Whilst chatting with James & the Very folk, John Warburton introduced himself with a very warm ‘Hiya Paul!’. Thanks John J 🙂
Next to join the chat was Teradata’s Nick Smith. I first worked with Nick at Co-Op in Manchester, and more recently at Lloyds Banking Group.
Then along came more Teradata folk including Rob Cowell, Daniel Reich and Matt Stubbs. Quite a crowd was gathering.
Surely they weren’t *all* interested in seeing my Teradata ‘cheat sheets’ from 1988-90? I know James is a big fan of these things. Rightly so.
With the chit-chat and lunch out of the way, it was time to head over to Rob Coppell for a geek-off.
Teradata ClearScape Analytics
Following a very informative demo/chat session, Rob kindly reminded me about the Teradata ClearScape demo system.
Starting my own environment was a doddle. 60 days and 30GB of cloud database storage for free. What’s not to like?
Once armed with credentials (URL, userid and password) I managed to connect first time with DBeaver.
All pretty standard Teradata DBMS stuff…so far…
Data Science Tools (For Free)
The real fun starts with the ‘Data Science’ stuff that folk want to see these days:
What Teradata has done here is very interesting:
- In-database analytics with no movement of data in/out of the DBMS
- Exploits native Teradata database parallelism (which they kinda invented)
- Lots of worked examples
Best of all, the Teradata ClearScape analytics capability comes bundled FOR FREE with the DBMS.
Watch this space for our thoughts on the bundled examples. It’ll take some time to work through the interesting ones. It does look very promising though.
Back to the conference…
Missing You Already
So, a very insightful & enjoyable day out was had by yours truly at Teradata Possible 2024.
Somewhat disappointingly, myself and yet another ex-LloydsTSB colleague ‘Tall’ Paul Ibberson managed to miss each other.
Ah well, there’s always next time…
