That Lockdown Feeling

During this ongoing and unfortunate COVID-19 crisis, all of us are trying to remain safe by staying home, applying social distancing and wearing masks. The current limitations on our daily lives are very necessary for our health. But activities we have taken for granted in the past, such as eating out at a restaurant, going to the movies, shopping in a mall or having a drink with your friends are now restricted. All these activities are what freedom allows us to do and we have realized the value of these freedoms only after they are gone. In the Data Analytics world, this state is reminiscent of those data consumers who cannot work freely because their analytic platform is severely restrictive, much like a self-imposed lockdown.

In the Data Analytics space, there are a variety of users – Business Analysts wanting to run reports on historical data, Data Scientists wanting to predict certain events or prescribe certain actions, and users wanting to “see or hear” from data using Deep Learning algorithms. All these consumers need the freedom to choose their programming language of choice, analytical workbench, statistical analysis tool, visualization tool, etc., while relying on a robust, integrated, and trusted data foundation. At the same time, they want consistent performance, linear scalability, a high number of concurrent users and lower cost per query.  

When users are made to use analytic platforms that are so restrictive that they cannot meet most of the above needs, they have put themselves in an unnecessary lockdown. Such platforms cannot allow full use of their users’ knowledge, experience, and skills to reach the most optimal solutions and take business favoring decisions.

Teradata Vantage is the only Data Analytic platform which offers multiple degrees of freedom and features to allow users to analyze data in whichever way they want – predictive, prescriptive and descriptive – while allowing a wide variety of languages (SQL, R, Python, SAS, Java, etc.), workbenches (Jupyter Notebook, etc.),  visualization tools (Tableau, Qlik, etc.), all on a massively parallel, robust data processing engine with the most mature optimizer and mixed workload management system, and deployed in a hybrid cloud. On a Teradata Vantage system, these freedoms are available by default. Only when users choose or move to another data analytic platform or another data warehouse technology do they realize they were taking these freedoms for granted.

While the lockdowns for the COVID-19 situation may be necessary, do not impose an unnecessary lockdown on your data consumers by choosing the wrong data analytic platform. It will severely restrict their intellectual freedom and creativity, and will hurt business growth.

Set yourself free by choosing Teradata Vantage!