Pinto Chacko, New York

Teradata is a software company, founded in 1979, that develops and sells a relational

database management system with the same name. Teradata was a division of the NCR Corporation, which acquired the Teradata Company on February 28, 1991. However, on January 8, 2007, NCR announced that it will spin-off Teradata as an independently traded company.

Teradata acts as a single data store that can accept large numbers of concurrent requests from multiple client applications. Significant features include:

• Unconditional parallelism, with load distribution shared among several servers.
• Complex ad hoc queries with up to 64 joins.
• Parallel efficiency, such that the effort for creating 100 records is same as that for creating 100,000 records.
• Scalability, so that increasing of the number of processors of an existing system linearly increases the performance. Performance thus does not deteriorate with an increased number of users.