When you push too much paper into your shredder, it jams; when you pour too much coffee into your cup, it overflows; when you eat too much food, you…well, you know. Everything’s got limits.

One thing that grabbed my attention when I first joined Teradata back in '88, and that I still find striking today, is how the database manages the level of work that enters the system. Managing the flow of work inside Teradata is decentralized, low-effort, and scalable, exhibiting control at the lowest possible level—at the AMP.

In the spirit of "Tis better to give than receive" comes the next blog on cool Viewpoint features, that being the ability to "share" a portlet. The shared portlets feature captures a customized version of a portlet and allows it to be shared as a distinct portlet for use by other Viewpoint users. It will appear in the admin menus as its own portlet including the same permissions options as the original portlet it was derived from. One may ask how does it work? And why would one use it?

October has been the busiest month yet on Developer Exchange, with an array of new content around Cloud Computing, simultaneous with announcements at our Partners 2009 conference. Where to start? Firstly, Mike Riordan introduces the Teradata Express 13.0 family, which is available in Windows and VMware versions.

After a spectacular Teradata Partners Conference, I'm back to do another cool Viewpoint features blog. I want to start out on this one with a little background on how this feature came about. In our first two Viewpoint releases, we focused on Teradata Management and Teradata Self Service aspects. Our customer base increased and with that, so did the importance of Viewpoint in the Teradata customer infrastructure. With that increased base and importance, it became clear that we needed to improve on the management aspects of the Viewpoint Appliance itself.

Maybe you are preparing for a floorsweep... Maybe you are planning to add more nodes to an existing system... Or, perhaps you are upgrading to Teradata 12 or Teradata 13.  In any of those situations, during your planning the question asked is "What can I do to help ensure my upgrade happens in the smoothest way possible?"

All the months of analysis, development and debugging are behind us. So is the long week of production implementation, and the crucial weekend conversions. Long, late, hours. Last minute corrections. Keeping the attitude and energy levels high.

This is the second in the series of blogs regarding cool features and tidbits within Teradata Viewpoint. Today's discussion is going to focus on SQL Scratchpad, a new Self Service portlet released with Viewpoint 13.0.1 in June 2009. SQL Scratchpad is the most significant addition to the Self Service aspect of Viewpoint since the "My Queries" portlet release in August 2008. SQL Scratchpad enables Teradata users in submitting ad-hoc SQL, getting result sets, and managing queries through a Viewpoint portlet.

Microsoft Visual Studio DataSet designer generates code (C#/VB.NET) to read data from a .NET Data Provider data source or apply changes to the data source. DataSet designer generates parameterized queries and sets the properties of DbParameter object to the corresponding column data type attributes. For example it sets DbParameter.DbType to DbType.String or DbType.Decimal. It also sets the DbParameter.Size to the column size which is the maximum number of characters for Char/VarChar columns.

I was asked the other day about the request cache, speficially, how to keep plans in the cache so the query does not have to undergo repetitive parsing and optimizing.  A request cache exists on each parsing engine (PE) and will hold generic plans that have been identified as potentially re-usable. For very short queries, request cache hits can reduce your elapsed time and provide more consistent response time. So the longer those re-usable plans stay in the cache, the better.

As the Product Manager for Viewpoint, I have the distinct pleasure of discussing, presenting, and demonstrating the extensive feature content to account teams, partners, and customers. My thanks goes out to the Viewpoint Engineering team in providing lots for me to talk about ... And learn. So this is the start of a series of blogs regarding cool features and tidbits I've found and continue to discover within Viewpoint.