Teradata has completed a major compiler conversion effort that should be completely transparent to customers, yet they are the main beneficiaries.  This article:

• Provides some historical background and context,
• Discusses the reasons we switched compilers,
• Identifies certain behavioral changes that were unavoidable,
• And, finally, answers a few technical questions related to the overall process.

The venerable IBM mainframe was the original client platform developed for the Teradata RDBMS via channel-attached connections way back in the 1980s. Although we now support a wide range of client platforms using network-attached connections, a significant segment of our customer base continues to use mainframe clients.

Data Mover is a Teradata Application that allows users to copy databases or tables between Teradata systems. It is a JEE based application that is composed of three major code components: the Client (Command-line interface or Viewpoint portlet), the Daemon, and the Agent. The Daemon is the central piece of the application and the Agent is a worker unit that does the actual job of moving data. Both the Damon and the Agent are deployed in a Linux managed server.

The foundations of the Aster platform are a parallel database with all the features you'd expect from a SQL platform.  However the power of the Aster platform really shines once you start using its library of SQL-MR analytic components.  With these components, complex data analysis that is difficult to code in SQL becomes much, much easier.  A clear example of this can be seen with Aster's nPath module.