Our company hired contractors to create our Teradata data warehouse and also create all the ETLs from the SQL Servers. I don't know if you are familiar with Teradata, but it was an eye opening experience for me. The Teradata import / export tools are very limited and there is no method to schedule jobs other than using Task Manager.

The database structure is also very different. The initial size of the database is created at installation time (done by NCR vendors) and subsequent databases are created by taking space from the main DBC database and allocating it to the new database. Interesting. There ae no schemas, but to reference objects you just specify the ownership like normal (database.object). Tereadata is normally installed on UNIX and it seems similar to Oracle.

All the ETLs were written in Python because it was the contractors code of choice--another unknown to me. They also used a data movement tool they created to import and massage the data.

I was greatly surprised to learn that a number of the management tools required a separate database to collect data in order to check the system health. I was also informed that there would be little to no DBA maintenance. How untrue. There is no rebuilding of indexes, but statistics need to be updated regularly. There is no built-in GUI or scheduler to create such tasks so Python code was used to update the stats and also to back up the databases. Too much manual stuff and coding in my opinion.

I was also told that the system is so fast that there would be no locking issues. Untrue again. I hope you like to read, because their documentation could choke a horse.

This is just a snippet of my data warehouse experience with Teradata. Good luck and have fun 🙂