As a result, the data loaded into the warehouse is mostly historic in nature.

To get a true representation of the business, normally this data is not changed once it is loa ded. Instead, it is interrogated repeatedly to transform data into useful information, to discove r trends and the effectiveness of operational procedures. This interrogation is based on busi ness rules to determine such aspects as profitability, return on investment and evaluation of risk. For example, an airline might load all of its maintenance activity on every airc raft into the database. Subsequent investigation of the data could indicate the frequency at w hich certain parts tend to fail. Further analysis might show that the parts are failing more often on certain models of aircraft. The first benefit of the new found knowledge regards the abi lity to plan for the next failure and maybe even the type of airplane on which the part will fail . Therefore, the part can be on hand when and maybe where it is needed, or the part might be proa ctively changed prior to its failure. If the information reveals that the part is failing more frequently on a particu lar model of aircraft, this could be an indication that the aircraft manufacturer has a probl em with the design or production of that aircraft. Another possible cause is that the mainte nance crew is doing something incorrectly and contributing to the situation. Either way, you c annot fix a problem if you do not know that a problem exists. There is incredible power and savings in this type of knowledge. Another business area where the Teradata database excels is in retail. It provid es an environment that can store billions of sales. This is a critical capability when you are recording and analyzing the sales of every item in every store around the world. Whether it is used for inventory control, marketing research or credit analysis, the data prov ides an insight into the business. This type of knowledge is not easily attainable without detai led data that records every aspect of the business. Tracking inventory turns, stock replenishm ent, or predicting the number of goods needed in a particular store yields a priceless p erspective into the operation of a retail outlet. This information is what enables one reta iler to thrive while others go out of business. Teradata is flourishing with the realization that detail data is critical to the survival of a business in a competitive, lower margin environment. Continually, businesses are forced to do more with less. Therefore, it is vital to maximize the efforts that work well to improve profit and minimize or correct those that do not work. One computer vendor used these same techniques to determine that it cost more to sell into

the desktop environment than was realized in profit. Prior to this realization, the sales effort had attempted to make up the loss by selling more computers. Unfortunately, incr eased sales meant increased losses. Today, that company is doing much better and has m ade a huge step into profitability by discontinuing the small computer line. Teradata Architecture The Teradata database currently runs normally on NCR Corporation's WorldMark Sys tems in the UNIX MP-RAS environment. Some of these systems consist of a single proces sing node (computer) while others are several hundred nodes working together in a sin gle system. The NCR nodes are based entirely on industry standard CPU processor chip s, standard internal and external bus architectures like PCI and SCSI, and standard memory modules with 4-way interleaving for speed. At the same time, Teradata can run on any hardware server in the single node env ironment when the system runs Microsoft NT and Windows 2000. This single node may be any computer from a large server to a laptop. Whether the system consists of a single node or is a massively parallel system w ith hundreds of nodes, the Teradata RDBMS uses the exact same components executing o n all the nodes in parallel. The only difference between small and large systems is th e number of processing components. When these components exist on different nodes, it is essential that the compone nts communicate with each other at high speed. To facilitate the communications, the multi-node systems use the BYNET interconnect. It is a high speed, multi-path, dual redunda nt communications channel. Another amazing capability of the BYNET is that the band width increases with each consecutive node added into the system. There is more detail on the BYNET later in this chapter.