NCR Corp has taken the wraps off the latest version of its Teradata relational database, Teradata 3.0, the product it’s banking on to reverse the slide in revenues (CI No 3,331). According to NCR, version 3.0 promises better performance in areas like decision support and transactional applications and Teradata should account for around 40% of its total business by the end of this year, up from the current figure of between 30% and 35%. After pressure from customers, it says that it will be introducing future releases of Teradata on a phased basis in a bid to deliver new code and performance enhancements faster. The first phase of the new release is shipping now and promises improved query performance of up to 40%, thanks to a hashing technique that enables tables to be merged and cross-referenced more quickly. The phase two release is due in April, and will feature new join indexes for managing the star schema, so data can be dynamically updated from a data warehouse to a data mart. The April release will also add Year 2000 compliance in the load utilities and query access tools in addition to the central database which is already Year 2000 compliant. NCR says the final part of the release, due in the summer, will focus on improving Online Analytical Processing features by creating extensions which will enable OLAP tools to operate from within the Teradata architecture. It’s also promising more ‘active warehouse’ features that will automate decision-making more easily in areas such as inventory management. Meanwhile, NCR has confirmed that Teradata for Windows NT should be ready for use on its WorldMark 4300 symmetrical multi-processing servers by around mid-year (CI No 3,302). However the NT port won’t now be ready on the company’s massively parallel PCI bus machines – the 4700 and 5100 boxes – until the end of the second quarter of 1999. That will depend on NCR porting its BYNet massively parallel interconnect clustering technology to the Microsoft platform. Keith Prince, European marketing manager for datawarehousing products, says the company is currently working with Microsoft engineers to re- engineer parts of NT to drive the interface effectively, but refused to elaborate further. The company says that Teradata on 64-bit Sun Solaris is tied to the release of Intel Corp’s Merced chip, currently expected sometime in the third or fourth quarter of next year.
