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Message Posted: Fri, 15 Mar 2002 @ 19:20:57 GMT

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Please forgive the long post.

We went through the same thought process at our shop. We recently added AIX and SQL Server connectivity to our existing mainframe source after considering two points:

- Manageability. The more platforms you connect to Teradata, the more potential you have for a "Wild Wild West" scenario where anything could come at any time from anywhere. We decided that if data was going to be loaded to Teradata, the entire process would be directed by our multiplatform scheduling package (Cybermation's ESP) for visibility, scheduling and error handling/callout standardization. If we need to schedule a maintenance window we can put processes across platforms on hold while Teradata is unavailable. Knowing what's going on is critical in case you're called for support.

- Cost of licensing the Teradata utilities for these platforms. We decided on a "portal box" approach to minimize licensing costs - one AIX box and one WIN2K box. The portal box's sole purpose is to accept datasets and load them to Teradata. This way you pay for a single license rather than multiple copies.

And finally, a note on OLE-DB. We evaluated it and found while it does transfer data easily and with no intermediates, we didn't like the fact that we could not force the created tables to align with our data warehouse naming and column definition standards. Sure, we could let OLE create and fill temp tables and insert/select the data into the warehouse in a separate step but that's twice the data movement. We decided to stick with MLoad, FastLoad and FastExport scripts placed on the portal boxes.

Hope this helps!

Adam

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