Teradata Reviews

We'd done a lot of replacements of sites. We've installed new systems with Unity support. We installed and deployed around about five systems for a bank in South Africa. When the old Teradata equipment became obsolete, we replaced them with new ones. 

I was involved with the whole thing from start to end. You can't just upgrade Teradata. You have to see if all of the other stuff is compatible with the new site. 

The most valuable feature of Teradata was actually the fact that it controls everything on a database. It's very, very fast. The way that it operates, the way it was designed, is quick. Not one other system, even IBM, is working on the principle of how Teradata is working. Teradata system is like a multiprocessor. In an IBM system, if you send him a query, the one CPU will handle it, and it will do the query and it'll send it out again. With Teradata, if the one query is coming in, you've got 12 CPUs and 20 hard drives; that query will be handled, at the same time, by the 12 CPUs and the 20 hard drives to store and subtract the information. It's just a totally different way how Teradata is working, and due to that, the performance of Teradata is extraordinary. There is no other system in the world that compares to it.

The setup is not straightforward.

I would like Teradata to get involved in South Africa. They aren't doing aggressive promotion of Teradata systems in South Africa. They really should.

I was dealing with the solution for 12 years. 

I was doing professional services for them. They call it PS, and I've done customer services support for them, for the hardware and software support CS for 12 years, and as we grow, that time when I started, we were quite small and as the time we're growing, we are getting more persons on board.

The stability is excellent except for Unity. That time when Unity was installed, if it was running on passive routing, it was fine; however, if you're running on active, there was still some problem with the software. We've tried to put it on active routing every time we experience major problems with the software. When that happens, we must go back to passive routing again. When I spoke to someone the other day, they said there's a new app now. They're going to shut down Unity. There's some other application they're going to install now. They're not going to continue with Unity anymore, and that's not being sold to clients anywhere worldwide. However, there was definitely a bug in the software. As we were installing Unity, there were always coming new releases out, and we had to upgrade, and even with the upgrades, it still gave us problems. It became better, yet it wasn't ever 100% successful.

Otherwise, with the other systems, for all our other clients, the 12 years I worked for them, I had maybe eight or nine P1 calls, meaning that the system was down. The system is very stable, except when we started to fill Unity for the bank. Then we had a lot of P1 calls caused by Unity.

For the Unity side, we've had issues. Otherwise, with the other systems, for all our other clients, the 12 years I worked for them, I had maybe eight or nine P1 calls, meaning that the system was down. The system is very, very stable, except when we started to fill Unity for the bank. Then we had a lot of P1 calls caused by Unity.

We had 120 people in our organization working with the solution. However, our clients, depending on which account, could have thousands of users. 

We get excellent, excellent support from Teradata. I had a good relationship with Teradata. I know all the guys quite well. We get excellent support. I can always phone them as well. Even if you log the call as the process from Teradata, if they tell you they will respond in so many hours on a P1, P2, or P3, it always happens when they say it will. It's not that I had to escalate something. However, they've been great overall. 

Positive

It's not straightforward. You must know what you're doing. If you don't feed the data in correctly, it's read like bad data, bad performance. We've seen a couple of times where we've done an investigation to understand why some of the queries are slow, and then we found out that the programmers made a mistake in the way that they've created the data or the query and that was causing the problems on Teradata. 

We've seen this a couple of times. You can't be an IBM person and think you can become a programmer for Teradata. It's two different systems, and we've seen it several times. You have to know what you're doing when you do it, especially on the analytics side of Teradata.

To deploy Teradata, it takes a lot of pre-planning. It can take anywhere from two to four months. It all depends. There's a lot of stuff, actually, for the pre-planning phase, and that's one of the most important things. You have to do a lot of homework before you actually replace the system or you migrate the system. There's lots of planning that you have to put in place before you do that. YOu need a minimum of two to four months.

For the customer CS support for the hardware and software support, we had around about six engineers that were supporting all six systems and we had three people off-site.

Here in South Africa, we didn't use consultants. Sometimes, if we don't come right, we will log a call with Teradata and ask them to help us. That said, all of the upgrades and everything we've done it on our own without any problems. We had some performance problems on the systems at the bank and then we got Teradata to assist, which they helped resolve.

They've got various licenses. We would ensure that clients have all the licenses and everything for all the systems rolled out. That was part of the deal when we sold our system to Teradata. In the new system, subscriptions ensured everything was covered, or most everything was covered. The only thing we brought into the subscription side was the hardware and software support were separate. In the old days, you had to take the node support, hardware and software local, and the subscription and the bar support. With the latest models we sold, you just had the local support which you brought in and the subscription. 

I was the national service support manager for Teradata South Africa. I was in charge of all the sites in South Africa, Gauteng, and Cape Town. I was in charge of all the support services for Teradata.

I'd recommend the solution to other organizations. 

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten. It's one of the best systems in the world. 

We use Teradata IntelliFlex for data warehousing, which is a way of presenting data for faster retrieval.

The solution's banking model, called FSLDM (Financial Services Logical Data Model), is sophisticated and good.

The solution’s pricing, scalability, and technical support response time could be improved.

I have been using Teradata IntelliFlex for one year.

Teradata IntelliFlex is a stable solution.

Since the solution is limited to its hardware, it has issues and limitations about scalability. Around 100 users are extensively using the solution in our organization.

The solution's technical support team is supportive but takes two to three days to respond.

Teradata IntelliFlex comes with hardware that is already deployed and preconfigured.

You purchase, deliver, and install the hardware and software to deploy the solution. People from Teradata will configure the software for you, and it will be ready.

Teradata IntelliFlex provides a lot of value to our organization.

Users have to pay a yearly licensing fee for Teradata IntelliFlex, which is very expensive.

Before choosing Teradata IntelliFlex, we evaluated other options like SQL Server and Oracle. We chose Teradata IntelliFlex because of its core competitive advantage in terms of a readymade model for the financial sector.

All analytics and reporting in our organization are done through the solution. Two people are required to maintain and operate the solution. We need five data modelers to design and develop the solution.

I advise users not to get stuck with the solution since it's expensive. The change on this platform is also expensive since it has so many associations with other layers. Currently, the new architecture for the data is to eliminate its complexity because it's a complex solution.

Overall, I rate Teradata IntelliFlex a seven out of ten.

We use it as a staging database in our organization, serving as a repository for financial models.

The current operational approach needs improvement. In the past, relying on infrastructure data staging provided flexibility in collaborating with any database provider. However, transitioning to Informatica and integrating it with various data services proved beneficial for serving multiple clients. Despite its advantages, this approach incurred substantial costs in terms of hardware and technical expertise. To address this, there is a need to develop and offer free content and workshops, providing guidelines and technical knowledge for efficient data operation.

I have been working with it for seven years.

I would rate its stability capabilities eight out of ten.

I would rate its scalability abilities six out of ten. While it provides scalability, it is notably complicated.

We previously used IBM, but due to the market requirements, we switched to Teradata.

The initial setup was straightforward.

It takes a couple of hours to be completely deployed.

It comes at a notably high cost for what it offers. Apart from the standard licensing fees, there are supplementary costs associated with the licensing course. I would rate it one out of ten.

Overall, I would rate it eight out of ten.

Our use cases are all about data ingestion, data manipulation, and data exploration. It's the core database for us.

It's the same as your visual database. I like the fast load feature for data, BTQ nd storage procedures are very good. They can avoid table locking, which is very good.

Sometimes the large ingestion jobs takes days to load data, and some of our stored procedures take longer. I don't know whether it's the tool or the network, but it takes a long time to execute complex commands.

I've been using this solution for around five years Now. We currently use the latest version. 

It is a stable solution. I would rate the stability a nine out of ten.

I would rate the scalability a nine out of ten. It is scalable. 

There are more than 100 users currently using Teradata in our organization.

The customer service and support are good. But they take a long time to respond.

So there is room for improvement in response time. 

It's a very straightforward installation process. It's good in terms of installation.

The solution requires maintenance. Our team of ten engineers manage and maintain the solution.

It is yearly basis. The licensing is based on a contract. It's a very expensive product.

I would rate the pricing model a three out of ten, where one is very expensive and not cost-effective, and then ten is a very cheap product. The solution is fairly expensive. 

Overall, if I consider the expense, features, and everything, then I would rate the solution a six out of ten.

Teradata Cloud Data Warehouse offers a more cost-effective cloud solution. However, the main challenge we encounter, especially in South Africa, is the limited bandwidth available for connecting to our cloud network. This is where the cost factor becomes significant, making it impractical to fully utilize the cloud due to the bandwidth constraints required for communication with the cloud. This limitation poses a major problem. While we can access certain features of cloud solutions from Teradata for free to evaluate them, it is not feasible for serving a large user base like two to three million people accessing the database. To accommodate such a user load, we would need a massive and robust pipeline connecting to the cloud.

The cloud is ten times better than physical hardware; it is more cost-effective and the upgrade process is ten times easier. Teradata Cloud options are also more affordable for anyone, especially for small companies. However, if our company expands significantly, it may become less affordable due to the costs associated with the necessary connection and bandwidth required to communicate with the servers.

South Africa must significantly improve its internet infrastructure to reduce its high costs. I believe South Africa is one of the most expensive countries in the world when it comes to obtaining high-speed internet connections. We need to establish different service level agreements with clients to ensure we have backup lines and redundancy. The crucial question we need to ask ourselves is, how reliable do we want our internet connection to be? In the case of using cloud services, it's essential to have another line as a backup in case the primary one fails. In our situation, having a backup line is definitely necessary, but it also adds to the expenses. For a major bank like ours, relying on a single connection to the cloud is not feasible; we must have a second line in place to ensure uninterrupted service in case of any issues with the primary line.

The cost of Teradata Cloud Data Warehouse has room for improvement.

I have been using Teradata Cloud Data Warehouse for a few years.

I don't think there is another system in the world as stable as Teradata. They have a redundant hardware setup with double components for everything. If one component fails, another one takes over. This redundancy extends to the data side as well. The system runs on multiple disks, so if one disk fails, the data is still available on another disk, and the replacement process is seamless thanks to hot-swappable components. We don't have to shut down the entire system to replace most parts in the Teradata system. We can simply slide out the faulty component and slide in a new one. Unlike old technologies that required powering down the entire system, Teradata's architecture allows for most operations to remain functional even during maintenance. However, in certain cases, depending on the architecture, we might need to power down the systems.

Teradata Cloud Data Warehouse is highly scalable. I believe that Teradata is more scalable than IBM. Teradata is ten times faster in processing data compared to IBM. When it comes to multi-processing, IBM loses out to Teradata. For example, if we want to store files and we're running five, and we have 20 disks, restoring a certain file will be slower with IBM compared to Teradata. Other solutions may restore that file on one disk and its mirror image, but with Teradata, it functions differently. It stores parts of the file on all the twenty disks, which is why it performs so fast. Teradata's ability to utilize all the disks in the configuration through multi-processing is the reason for its speed.

The technical support at Teradata is the best in the world. All the support engineers have university degrees, and Teradata has its own university where we can access all their courses and components available in the market. This includes other applications as well. All of these resources can be found at Teradata University. About 80 percent of the courses can be completed remotely, but there are certain aspects that require in-person attendance in a classroom setting.

To access Teradata University and its resources, being a client is necessary, and certain subscriptions must be purchased based on our specific needs and inquiries, particularly regarding the Database Administrator side. The information we can access depends on the licenses we acquire with the system.

Positive

The initial setup is straightforward, but we may struggle the first couple of times; however, it is very user-friendly. Anybody can download the solution and play with it. Moreover, there is a place where we can ask for help if we encounter problems during the installation of Teradata Cloud. This is one of the reasons why Teradata is very popular, as there are always people available to assist us.

The time required to set up a cloud depends on its size. For a small Teradata Cloud, it usually takes around 45 minutes to complete the setup process.

The most important part is to do our planning and understand the client's requirements before deploying the solution. There is no point in deploying a cloud solution for a client without knowing their specific requirements. Therefore, I believe that the planning phase is the most crucial aspect. Once we have a clear understanding of what the client wants, we can proceed with setting up Teradata Cloud Data Warehouse for them.

The implementation is done in-house by our solution architects.

Teradata used to be expensive, but they have been lowering their prices. The cost is becoming more comparable to other models, like IBM. I would rate the price a seven out of ten, with ten being the highest.

I rate Teradata Cloud Data Warehouse ten out of ten.

Teradata Cloud Data Warehouse is plug-and-play, much like Microsoft. It is a user-friendly and efficient product, and users will be pleased with its speed. 

We use Teradata to build data warehouses for our customers.

The ability to handle machine data parallel processing is the most valuable feature of Teradata. The fundamental design concept involves moving from Oracle's design process to achieving the best possible design. This represents a departure from traditional approaches and is an innovative idea introduced by Teradata in the industry. Many newer databases, such as Snowflake and Vertica, have adopted similar architectures.

Teradata can improve the way it handles big data and unstructured data.

I have been using Teradata for 16 years.

I give the stability of Teradata a ten out of ten.

I give the scalability of Teradata an eight out of ten.

The technical support is good and responsive.

Positive

The initial setup is straightforward. The deployment time is contingent upon the scale of the migration and moving from a lower to a higher environment is not a challenging task. The time it takes to migrate the data is also dependent on the source database and what ETL tool we are using. Around two to three engineers and one architect are required for the deployment.

We implement the solution for our clients.

Snowflake is built on top of the Teradata architecture but it has more flexibility.

I give Teradata an eight out of ten.

For enterprise-level organizations, Teradata is a suitable option.

We use Teradata as our company's data warehouse engine to process tons of data since we are the Central Bank of Columbia, where we use that for statistics to study several areas of banking. Our main database, data warehousing, data mining, and back office statistics are done with the help of Teradata. We heavily use Oracle as our transactional database, but we use Teradata for all other purposes.

I am not exactly the person doing the programming and exploring the product's different features. To get information on the product's features, I will have to contact some engineers in charge of programming. The most valuable feature of the product is the ability of the product to process huge amounts of data without creating conflicts in the queries. The way the database and IntelliFlex are designed, you can process several queries from different applications simultaneously, and they don't conflict with each other. I mean, I think that's the reason why we find improvements in our query time. The way the queries are internally in IntelliFlex process makes them less complicated. In other databases, when you start a query, the dataset is put on hold for a while, so all the queries have to wait for the first query to finish. IntelliFlex and Teradata are designed to avoid such an issue because I am unsure. I feel Teradata IntelliFlex can function in the aforementioned manner since they manage smaller sets of data, because of which there are no conflict queries between one and the other.

I don't have the exact details of the improvement needed in the performance of Teradata IntelliFlex because I work with the infrastructure department. The infrastructure department is in charge of getting infrastructure for the system to work, but before having Teradata, the data processing was taking a lot longer than it is now. We got into Teradata because we needed fast processing of huge amounts of data since, in the past, we were trying to achieve it with Oracle databases, and it wasn't good enough. In the last two years, the processing times have reduced by a third or a fourth of the time without causing any problems because of the efficiency of the Teradata engine.

The only issue our company has with Teradata IntelliFlex is that it is not cost-effective because of the way the product has been designed. We have Teradata IntelliFlex on-premises because we pay for a lot of muscle that we are not using. The problem we're seeing is that when we try to move into Teradata IntelliFlex's cloud services, we notice that Teradata doesn't have a flexible price structure to allow you to use a fraction of IntelliFlex's extension and charge just for the use of the solution. We receive messages from Teradata asking us to pay for the services we use on-premises, while in reality we use less than 30 percent of the machine's capacity.

There is something that is not working in favor of the business models for IntelliFlex when you plan to move to the cloud.

I have been using Teradata IntelliFlex for two years. Our company plans to renew the solution's latest version, but the hardware is around two years old.

Stability-wise, I rate the solution a nine out of ten. In the two years we have been using the platform, we have had only one or two issues that got the service out for a few hours.

The product's scalability is great. Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten.

I rate the technical support a nine to ten out of ten.

Positive

The initial setup was straightforward. Before IntelliFlex, we were using Teradata's 2700 and 2800 appliances. We were moving from a Teradata appliance to a new Teradata appliance, and during that process, we were able to move all the data in between three to six months without a problem, keeping both platforms working until we moved into IntelliFlex. The setup phase was a good process.

The solution is deployed on-premises. We are planning to move to the cloud in the future.

We feel that we are given the services from Teradata IntelliFlex for what we are paying. We are the Central Bank of Colombia, a non-profit organization, making it difficult for us to say that because of IntelliFlex, our earnings have increased. My institution doesn't aim for any earnings. We have been able to provide much better services to all of our customers, including all the financial institutions in our country, because of which I can say there has been a return on investment using Teradata IntelliFlex. A return on investment is possible based on the improvements in our service to our customers.

Our company is just looking to see if there is another product other than Teradata IntelliFlex that we can use in the future, not because we are not happy with the product. The reviews on Teradata IntelliFlex point out that it is a very solid and efficient solution, but we are slightly worried about the cost.

The price and the pricing structure should be improved.

Two years ago, we had plans to move into the cloud since we were doing so with all the products we have in our company to avoid having our own data centers. When we tried to move Teradata IntelliFlex to the cloud this year, we noticed that at this point in time, we might have to stay on-premises for a couple of years or until Teradata provides us with a better price structure. Owing to the aforementioned reasons, we have been considering moving to another more flexible platform and more price convenient for our company.

We are happy with the services provided by Teradata IntelliFlex.

At this point, it's worth looking at other alternatives other than Teradata IntelliFlex, depending on the kind of use you plan to do with the platform. There are certain areas of our company where we have noticed that we could get the same benefits from another platform, especially from the ones which are not pricey. If you really want to take advantage of the wonderful performance and speed that Teradata provides, then you need to choose it. But if you don't need the level of performance offered by Teradata, you can look for other alternatives. 

Overall, I rate the tool a nine out of ten.

We use it primarily as a dedicated platform for aggregating structured data, essentially serving as our structured data repository or data warehouse.

Their extensive experience in data warehousing, the platform's performance, and their strong reputation in the market are the most valuable.

One issue we've identified is that its performance varies across different on-premises setups and doesn't consistently meet our standards. This limitation necessitates the purchase of Teradata's proprietary hardware to ensure the desired level of performance. The capability to implement it with comparable performance across various private cloud environments, ensuring adaptability to different infrastructure setups would be beneficial.

I have been using it for four years.

The stability is excellent, and I would rate it nine out of ten.

The challenge lies in the necessity to purchase additional hardware for scaling, so I would lean towards a rating of around four out of ten for the overall experience.

The technical support is satisfactory; I would rate it seven out of ten.

Neutral

I would rate the initial setup six out of ten when it comes to complexity.

I would rate the return on investment eight out of ten.

The cost is significantly high. I would rate it eight out of ten.

Overall, I would rate it seven out of ten.