Teradata Database 13.10

Todd Walters introduced the new release – 13.10. Not every feature is equally interesting to me but a couple were important to note:

One of the key features in the new database release is the support for temporal tables. Default for a temporal table will be to show only current records. But you can ask simple queries to find the records as they were on a certain date as well as find the differences between the data between dates etc. This can use system date/times or business date/times.

This will be very helpful for companies in avoiding the problem of “leaks from the future” in analytics (one of the big risks in data mining) by making it easy to find the data that was true as of a certain moment – what did I know about every customer the day they signed up, for instance, would be an easy query using the new approach.

Geo-spatial integration is also improved in this release with better performance and making it easier for third parties to integrate. This is good as geo-spatial is going to be more and more important as things become more instrumented. Glad to see also that Teradata remembers that machines need to be able to use the analysis not just pictures. It’s nice if I can visualize the customers around a store but much more useful if my systems can find the nearest customer to a store or tell insurance agents which customers were in a storm track.

The combination of these two might be interesting too – contact the people who have ever lived in a house in the area of a natural disaster (Tornado, flood, earthquake) so I can target them with disaster insurance!

Also new/updated in 13.10:

• Better compression of data to save I/O
• User defined SQL operators (making User Defined Functions or UDFs SQL-based not C-based)
• Character data and timestamps to drive partitioning
• Fastpath approach to allow Teradata to install new functions faster
• FastExport
• More workload definitions and classifications, better support for utilities in workloads
• All sorts of other very DBA-specific improvements around cylinder packing, fallbacks and more.