I will have to strongly disagree with the previous post. Teradata is complete garbage, it does not lead in anything and was not even one of the 20 mentioned in Gartners Review. I have used it its not fast at querying or opening a database, get used to waiting 5 minutes for a table to open just so you can see the columns. I queried over a million records with SQL Server 2008 R2 on my local server in less than a second, it took teradata on the network about 15 minutes the 5th time. No way of looking at an execution plan, the visual look is what you may expect to have seen in 1983. I would use Access or Excel and get more accomplished. If my argument does not sound convincing get on the job boards and count the number of companies looking for Teradata VS SQL Server 2008 R2 or SQL Server 2012 it only trails Oracle in RDBMS but leads in growth, and it leads in Business Intelligence features. I am sure by know you know the answer regarding Teradata's BI tools, non existent so after spending more money on just the RDBMS you will fork out more for an ETL tool, then a Reporting Tool and probably another reporting tool since this seems to be a trend, and then based on whats left maybe a water downed OLAP tool which by the way is MS SQL Server's most robust product it has been the number 1 OLAP tool for 9 plus years which is the direction of this profession with data growth. I work for a great company that uses both but after a couple of weeks I made it clear I am not going to develop with Teradata when SQL Server is available, big companies make a lot of money and yet spend on crap like this more often than I would have thought. FYI I would not be suprised if Teradata is even around in 3-5 years, or upgrades thier product. That is why rumors of being acquired or moving to a different data management profile have surfaced.