Teradata Expands Offer to Migrate Oracle Users

Teradata Expands Successful Offer to Migrate Oracle Users

Dozens of companies achieve better return on investment with Teradata enterprise data warehouse

Teradata, a division of NCR Corporation (NYSE: NCR), announced the expansion of its successful Oracle-to-Teradata migration program that provides companies with the ability to quickly and effectively improve their data warehousing capabilities. With a stronger, more robust data warehouse, companies are better prepared to solve the business problems of how to increase revenue, reduce expenses and identify new business growth opportunities.

“Since the public launch of the Oracle-to-Teradata migration program in 2000, more than 120 industry-leading companies have migrated Oracle data marts to the Teradata® enterprise data warehouse,” said Julian Beavis, Teradata vice president for New Zealand, Australia and South East Asia. “The expanded Oracle-to-Teradata migration program makes it even easier for businesses to take advantage of Teradata’s superior data warehousing capabilities. The continued increase in business opportunity is what drives us to enhance this program. The better we make it, the easier it is for our customers to improve their data warehouse environment.”

The expanded Oracle-to-Teradata migration program benefits from the newly released Teradata Warehouse 7.1 suite, more powerful servers and Teradata Database V2R5.1 data warehousing software which includes User Defined Functions (UDFs). UDFs are programming shortcuts that make it easier to create customised database functions. A library of UDFs has been created for use by the Teradata Professional Services consulting team, which includes many standard Oracle and DB2 functions that assist in migration. They save time and money by reducing the need for the manual development of new structured query language (SQL) to recreate the customised functions.

In addition, the Teradata Professional Services consulting team has introduced two new tools and enhanced an existing tool to reduce the length of the conversion from months to weeks, or even days, depending on the scope of the project and the amount of data involved. The tools automatically transfer from Oracle to Teradata data models (tables or indexes), the data itself, programs that load the data, reports and the SQL in applications. The migration is virtually transparent to business users.

According to Beavis, many companies who use Oracle for online transaction processing tried using it for data warehousing and discovered severe limitations. Those Oracle customers that adopted Teradata have found that the Teradata enterprise data warehouse can accommodate a greater number of users, provide faster response time to queries and even run complex queries that would not execute on an Oracle data warehouse.

The long-tested and robust Oracle-to-Teradata data migration tool has been enhanced. It can read the Oracle data models, then create scripts or instructions to build the models in Teradata and transfer the data to the Teradata database. While the scripts are running, they are capable of simultaneously performing data conversion, data cleanup and data synchronisation. To further automate the migration process, two new tools have been added to quickly and efficiently migrate customers from Oracle to Teradata. The Estimator tool identifies the scope of the project, estimates the length of time for conversion and builds a project plan with tasks to ensure a timely, effective migration effort. The Automated Application Migration tool (AAMT) quickly and efficiently converts Oracle SQL in applications into optimised Teradata SQL. The applications run faster in Teradata and require less database management than in Oracle.

To orchestrate all aspects of the migration, Teradata has integrated the migration tools with the recently announced Teradata Solutions Methodology, a comprehensive project-management solution. Teradata Professional Services consultants use the Teradata Solutions Methodology to visualise, display, define and manage the sequence of work of hundreds of separate migration tasks. It is available in eight languages.

The specialised Teradata training curriculum for Oracle professionals that speeds their skill development and maximises their ability to benefit from Teradata has also been updated. Web-based and instructor-led classes are available.

The Oracle-to-Teradata migration program was first announced in 2000. The success of this ongoing, well-established program is based on many components that fully support customers as they make the transition. It has been successful with industry-leading companies, some of which have grown the size of their user database, as well as greatly improving the return on investment of their data warehouse.

To support companies that are planning to migrate, the program offers the Teradata benchmarking centre’s tailored services where companies can test the Teradata warehouse and analytic applications in a demanding, real-world environment. They can compare Teradata capabilities against their current vendor. These benchmarks are the true indicators of how a customer’s application will actually perform on a given platform.

The Teradata Professional Services consultants continue to advise on, or conduct the migration work from standardised best practices developed during scores of migrations. Based on the proven Teradata Solutions Methodology, they are able to quickly and effectively migrate systems and get the Teradata warehouse up and running so businesses can realise the return on investment in a shorter time frame. Teradata also works with industry-leading partners to further refine and improve its Oracle migration best practices.

© Scoop Media