This article discusses the use of the Teradata Performance Monitor (COM) object which makes real time Teradata performance information available to a Windows application in a simple object oriented manner.

Introduction

Although Teradata provides tools that allow performance monitoring of the Teradata Database, these tools do not always address the specific needs of every customer.  If a customer has a requirement that is not fulfilled by one of the available tools they can write their own performance monitoring and alerting application.
Teradata provides three alternatives that may be used for this purpose:

  1. The Performance Monitor API
    This requires extensive knowlege of low level Teradata CLI programming.
  2. The Teradata Performance Monitor (COM) Object
    Simple to use, high performance, but limited to Microsoft Windows.
  3. A set of User Defined Functions
    Useful for Ad Hoc requirements but limited performance for applications. 

In this series of articles we will discuss the use of the COM object, which is both easy to use, and performant.