Teradata’s open source connect

MUMBAI, INDIA: Teradata has announced that it will share the ODBC/JDBC drivers for Presto; opening business intelligence and analytic applications for the open source query engine, for free.

Some of the benefits include:

•    The drivers provide the connection and implementation protocol for transferring the query and result between the application and database.

•    Effectively utilize organizations’ analytic environments to run interactive analytical queries at scale, and leverage existing SQL business intelligence and visualization tools on Hadoop.

•    By leveraging the ODBC and JDBC interfaces, organizations will also be able to easily develop business intelligence applications in the data lake.

•    The goal is to increase adoption beyond the world-class Silicon Valley companies that are already using the platform, Teradata said.

Secondly, the company also launched an open source module for Python that enables programmers to easily create a new generation of applications that exploit the data warehouse.

Python applications can run on an application server and send SQL queries to the Teradata Database or run within the Teradata Database.  As in any Python application, programmers can use the vast collection of capabilities in Python libraries for advanced analytics or data manipulation. Publicly available Python libraries include the Python Standard Library, NumPy/SciPy, Biopython, Pandas, Mlpy, and Dateutil/Pytz.

Organizations often have hundreds or thousands of applications running thousands or millions of queries daily to meet the needs of frontline workers. The challenge is that applications are not static; they must constantly evolve to meet the ever-changing needs of the business. Teradata’s introduction of DevOps provides a bridge between software developers and data warehouse operations, which enables them to easily create, continuously upgrade, and manage applications.

Some of the offerings include:

•    Consistent application tooling and logging: the module reduces the tedium of hand coding based on strict programming standards and offers consistent activity logging and impact analysis capabilities.

•    Easy connection to Teradata database: The Python applications easily connect to the Teradata Database through Representational State Transfer (REST) services from any device, anytime and anywhere or standard ODBC (Open Database Connectivity) drivers.

•    Application execution in addition to query execution: To support administrators overseeing operations, applications built in Python capture script version, run id, and execution time for version impact analysis and analyzing applications, not just queries.

•    Python Database API Specification v2.0: Implements the standard Python interface to databases.

“Presto is a key technology in the Netflix big data platform. One big challenge has been the absence of enterprise grade ODBC and JDBC drivers. We think it's great that Teradata has decided to accelerate their plans and deliver this feature this year,” said Kurt Brown, Director, Data Platform, Netflix.

“The introduction of DevOps practices for the data-driven business creates a new standard for agility, which is long overdue,” said Stephen Hendrick, Principal Analyst, Application Development and Deployment Research, ESG, an IT research, analyst, strategy, and validation firm.

The Teradata Module for Python package is now available and can be installed directly from PyPI. The open source code is released to GitHub and the documents are available on the Teradata Developer Exchange community site for the Teradata Database.