This article delves into the potential excessive use of Multi-Column (MC) Statistics and a process for identifying those that are not providing benefit and should be removed. This will reduce complexity and save resources on the re-collection of these redundant statistics.

I gave a presentation at the Teradata Partners Conference last week on the fundamentals of collecting statistics, where I touched briefly on the rules behind confidence levels. I’m using this article to go into further depth, and offer you more examples of how these confidence levels come about. If you look at query plans much, I’m confident you’ll find something of interest in this article.

The Teradata Agile Analytic Cloud allows business users and developers to easily allocate an elastic data mart (i.e. a database) inside the Teradata System. Using an on demand self service portlet (the Elastic Marts Builder portlet), the user can create a database, upload comma separated values (.CSV) data, and begin analysis – all within 5-10 minutes.

We all know the benefits of identifying and fixing badly performing workloads. Many sites use the common method of identifying the top n highest consuming or skewed queries (often the same queries) and fixing those.

Teradata Express for VMware (TDE-V) is a free, fully operational Teradata VM with up to one terabyte of storage. Imagine being able to install a fully operational Teradata database on your PC and be running queries in five minutes, easy as 1-2-3.

The Teradata Express program offers customers a free evaluation version of the Teradata database as a download from Teradata.com.  While the Express edition is not licensed for production usage and is not officially supported, this is a fully functional Teradata database that is a great tool for developers and testers working on their Teradata projects or other who want hands-on learning with Teradata. 

Cloud Computing is a computing service provisioning and delivery model in which users get access to dynamically scalable computing capacity over the network in a pay-as-you-use payment scheme. While its attractiveness may differ depending on whom you've talked to, its service-oriented nature gives users two important benefits: ease of application deployment (someone else's hard works laying down the hardware and software foundation) and on-demand access anytime from anywhere. These characterstics make Cloud Computing ideally suited for developers who want to quickly try something out in an isolated "good" environment without the overhead of system setup or the capital expenses of paying for systems they no longer need after they are done. 

Teradata Virtual Storage
On August 24, 2009 Teradata Corporation announced the availability of Teradata Virtual Storage, innovative software that virtualizes data storage. Teradata Virtual Storage enables Teradata customers to add storage capacity at very low cost and to maximize performance to meet the enterprise intelligence demands of business users.

Cached plans are good. For repetitive queries, cached plans remove the overhead of parsing and optimizing, and this helps short work perform more consistently. But sometimes cached plans, being general-purpose and one-size-fits-all, are not able to take advantage of specific optimizations that could help selective executions of the query if only the optimizer could see those parameterized SQL values. New in Teradata 12, the optimizer has the opportunity, under specific conditions, to peek at values in a parameterized SQL request.

This article examines what Enterprise Logical Data Models (ELDMs) are, what the value of Enterprise Logical Data Models can be, and why that value is sometimes not able to be realized.  Some real world scenarios are offered to illustrate what can happen with regard to the use, disuse,  and development of ELDMs.