This headline is not an allusion to the inevitable jet lag that many visitors from our region still feel. It’s about the most spectacular announcement that has been made today at the Teradata Partners conference today, in my view at least. And, as I indicated yesterday, there was a whole wealth of technologically interesting news at today’s media briefing. More on those later.
Think about this: Have you ever wondered why on earth you have taken a decision that turned out to be awfully wrong? If this has ever happened to you, I am sure that you had at least one well-worked out theory. You will say that you didn’t pay enough attention to X or that you were too much preoccupied with Z and, most importantly, you vow to never make this mistake, any mistake again. Data warehousing is all about decision support. So if you want to know why decisions were made in a certain way, they should give a good idea, shouldn’t they? You should be able to simply rewind those data and look at the full view of the time.
This was actually not so easy for various reasons. Data change over time, some of the data simply gets overwritten, and this is why we used to take snapshots of these data every now and again. But this is not enough to capture when exactly certain changes occurred and what effect this had on dependent data. This used to require a lot of “manual” work (complex coding, really) that is now being done by the Teradata Database 13.10. The effect will be much like with geospatial in the recent past: everyone relied on zip codes because geographical representation was such a hustle – and suddenly every mobile application uses it. So it bet that the temporal rewind button will be everywhere in the near future. And you can use it to find out what you really did know when you took a certain decision. You can even use it to demonstrate this to third parties if you want to. And there are lots of business questions that you can answer a great deal more easily and accurately with this feature. I find this whole idea really fascinating, maybe because I remember the movie Back to the Future so well. It was released in Italy exactly 25 years before Teradata’s temporal data announcement. If I could rewind my life to the 80s, I would probably be having a good time listening to an U2 vinyl. I wonder whether I would feel more like “Marty McFly” (Michael J. Fox) who doesn’t really grasp what is happening to him or like “Doc” who feels completely in control all the time.
- Teradata offers a Unified Logical Data Model now that allows enterprises to map all of their value chains from beginning to end (and possibly crossing boundaries of industry that were previously catered for with distinctive LDMs)
- More performance, storage and usability with the platform family, which has a full five members by now
- Teradata Relationship Manager has incorporated modules to engage customers on smartphones, iPads and social media sites within seconds – with all the knowledge stored in the data warehouse at hand
- Teradata Accelerated Analytics Portfolio includes lots of new data types, emerging technologies, partner optimizations, and tools for application development
And there is also some news from our partnerships that I won’t be able to cover today. As I have said, there was a lot. And hey look, I can’t go massive-parallel. I’m a mere human being – and I plan to keep it that way for the foreseeable future. But I pledge that I’ll come back to you as soon as I can. See you.
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