Datasheet

16
Part I: The Data Warehouse: Home for Your Data Assets
Additionally, commercial and hardware/software companies began to emerge
with solutions to this problem. Between 1976 and 1979, the concept for a
new company, Teradata, grew out of research at the California Institute of
Technology (Caltech), driven from discussions with Citibank’s advanced
technology group. Founders worked to design a database management
system for parallel processing with multiple microprocessors, specifically
for decision support. Teradata was incorporated on July 13, 1979 and
started in a garage in Brentwood, California. The name Teradata was chosen
to symbolize the ability to manage terabytes (trillions of bytes) of data.
The 1980s — the birth
The 1980s: the era of yuppies. PCs, PCs, and more PCs suddenly appeared
everywhere you looked — as well as more and more minicomputers (and
even a few Macintoshes). Before anyone knew it, “real computer applica-
tions” were no longer only on mainframes; they were all over the place —
everywhere you looked in an organization. The problem called islands of
data was beginning to look ominous: How could an organization hope to
compete if its data was scattered all over the place on different computer
systems that weren’t even all under the control of the centralized data-
processing department? (Never mind that even when the data was all stored
on mainframes, it was still isolated in different files and databases, so it was
just as inaccessible.)
A group of enterprising, forward-thinking people came up with a new idea:
Because data is located all over the place, why not create special software to
enable people to make a request at a PC or terminal, such as “Show per-store
sales in all worldwide regions, ranked in descending order by improvement
over sales in the same period a year earlier”? This new type of software,
called a distributed database management system (distributed DBMS, or
DDBMS), would magically pull the requested data from databases across the
organization, bring all the data back to the same place, and then consolidate
it, sort it, and do whatever else was necessary to answer the user’s question.
(This process was supposed to happen pretty darned quickly.)
To make a long story short, although the concept of DDBMSs was a good one
and early results from research were promising, the results were plain and
simple: They just didn’t work in the real world. Also, the islands-of-data
problem still existed.
Meanwhile, Teradata began shipping commercial products to solve this
problem. Wells Fargo Bank received the first Teradata test system in 1983, a
parallel RDBMS (relational database management system) for decision
support — the world’s first. By 1984, Teradata released a production version
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