Teradata unveils improved QueryGrid connectors

Data infrastructure is all well and good, but it doesn’t accomplish anything if the end users — the people who use the data to make business decisions — can’t easily access the data or work with it.

“My view of the world is that Hadoop has its place in the data center, but it’s not going to take over the world,” says Imad Birouty, director of Product Marketing at Teradata. “One of the things that we’re seeing is that users in the market have come to realize that Hadoop is a powerful engine, but it’s not for the everyday user. The business analyst, who is the person you want to be able to access and analyze that data, can’t really interact with that data because they’re not MapReduce programmers. You need tools on top of that to give the everyday business analyst a way to interact with and access the data.”

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Simplifying that task is the aim of Teradata QueryGrid, a software-based service embedded in Teradata Database that’s designed to allow it to seamlessly orchestrate the processing of data across an analytical ecosystem with multiple heterogeneous data sources — including Hadoop, other Teradata Databases and Teradata Aster Databases, as well as RDBMS databases. In other words, business users can use it (with SQL) to tackle complex questions with disparate data without having to manually move data or learn a new language.

How it works

You can initiate queries from a Teradata Database to access, filter and return subsets of data from Hadoop, Aster and other database environments to the Teradata Database for additional processing.

For instance, you might have a fraud analysis that’s running in your data warehouse. To supercharge the process, you want to extend the analysis to seek out anomalies in your Web transactions — Web log data that probably resides in your Hadoop cluster. QueryGrid can spawn an algorithm that runs in your Hadoop cluster and then deliver the answer to your data warehouse, which can then incorporate the results into the final analysis.

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On Monday, Teradata announced a significant expansion of QueryGrid technologies. These include: QueryGrid for Teradata-to-MapR, Teradata-to-Cloudera Distribution for Hadoop and Aster-to-Cloudera Distribution for Hadoop. Teradata also announced global availability of QueryGrid for Teradata-to-Teradata and enhancements to its existing support for Teradata-to-Hortonworks Data Platform.

Teradata-to-Cloudera, Aster-to-Cloudera, Teradata-to-Teradata and Teradata-to-Hortonworks are now globally available. Teradata-to-Aster and Teradata-to-MapR will be available by the end of the second quarter.

“We’ve got our foot on the gas and we’re delivering,” Birouty says. “We’re announcing new connectors. We’ve delivered on the connectors we’ve previously announced and they are shipping today. We’re moving really fast on this.”

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