Teradata on Azure

With growing demand to increase its footprint, Teradata is now available on the cloud. This means that customers now don't have to worry about data centers and setting up the hardware.

Teradata has availability on the cloud as follows:

• Private cloud
• Public cloud
• Mixed cloud

With a proper subscription account, you can create your own Teradata Database on the cloud with all the capability and features you require. 

With the current setup of Azure you can only deploy a 32 node system; if you require more nodes get in touch with Teradata sales personnel.

The thing you need to note is, many things in this recipe might change over time and some of them might not be valid. As the cloud platform is under continuous change, please check your subscription type before deploying a Teradata solution. Deploying Teradata on Azure is similar; you buy Teradata hardware on premises, you need to purchase the software with various available purchase methods.

Deploying Teradata on cloud can cost you money, so be very vigilant when deploying database, as charges/fees can come as a surprise to you.

You can also deploy Teradata with all the additional products such as Viewpoint, datamover, and many others. Or you can buy these products individually; this gives you added advantages when you require flexibility.

There are many factors and parameters when you deploy the solution to the cloud, but in this recipe we will only cover how to create a Teradata Database and Viewpoint instance in Azure and make it available publicly.

Getting ready

You need to have an Azure subscription. Log in to the Azure marketplace and create a free account. It is recommended to have a subscription-based account to have enough cores available to you. Following are some prerequisites:

• Pay-as-you-go subscription on your Azure account
• Sufficiently high quota limits (recommended: 128 cores) in your Azure account

How to do it...

1. Once you are logged in to the Azure marketplace, search for Teradata, and as shown in the screenshot, select Teradata Database from the list:

2. On next window, read the terms and conditions. And after that, click on Create, as shown in the screenshot:

3. Next will be the window with the list of steps. In the first step, you need to provide a User name, a Password, and select a Location based on your requirements. Not all the Locations have products that you require. Click OK to move to step 2. Check the screenshot for details:

4. In step 2, select the name of your database, and provide the DBC password (keep it safe in a notepad). Also, select the flavor or Database Tier and Version of the database you want. Azure hosts the latest version Td 16.10. Click OK to move to the next step. Check the following screenshot:

5. The next step will be configuring your Viewpoint. To keep it simple, select only a single monitoring Viewpoint system. All the fields are self-explanatory. Password here will be used to log in to Viewpoint via an admin account. Check the following screenshot:

6. Options 4 to 8 are optional. You can either enable or disabled them as per your requirements.
7. In step 8, once all the configuration is done, a final validation is executed, which checks for all the parameters and cores available at your location. If all went fine, your deployment will start after you make the required purchase. Once finished with the configuration, a template will be prepared for future use. You can download the template from your database, which can be used afterwards if you want to create a same configuration system or want to use template based deployment. Check the following screenshot:

8. Your deployment will start, as shown in the following screenshot. It will take approximately 30 mins or so to get the system up and running. You can check the progress from the Resource group option from the left-hand side of the toolbar, and under the resource group you created while deploying the database. Check the following screenshot:

9. Now to connect our system on cloud with our local machine, we need to make system available publicly. To do this, once your system is up and running, go to Resource groups and select search for database. From the list, we will select network interface. In this option, we will enable the option to access this database publicly. Check the following screenshot:

10. In the settings, click on IP configurations; next, click on the IP address in the bar. For the next option displayed, select Enabled under Public IP address and click Save, as shown in the screenshot:

11. Once you have enabled the public IP, you can now give a DNS name to the IP for easy access. To enable this, search for public IP under the type column in your resource group. Under the Configuration tab, enter the DNS name as seems fit and save the settings. This can be seen in the following screenshot:

12. Repeat the same step for enabling a public IP and assigning a DNS name for accessing Viewpoint from your local machine. 

 

13. Open your SQLA and enter the DNS name you grabbed from the settings, and enter the server name to create a DSN connection:

14. You can do the same for Viewpoint; grab the DNS as shown in the screenshot and enter it locally in your web browser. Log in using an admin account and enable the system to monitor your existing Teradata Database:

15. Welcome to Teradata on Azure.

How it works...

Teradata on Azure gives you the same performance as on premises. You can get same power of analytic database as you get from an on-premises database. Once on the cloud you can configure your system and can take advantage of the additional Azure applications, as well, to monitor and create system alerts.

If you are stuck with any of the issues when performing deployment, it is advisable to contact the Azure help desk via your dashboard. A ticket will be created and the issue will be resolved based on your subscription type:

There's more...

Once you deploy your Teradata Database, from time to time you need to upgrade or apply patches to the database. You need to download these from the Teradata access portal and, based on your license tiers, Teradata engineering will help you.

There are four license tiers available as of now:

• Developer: With low performance
• Base: With simple and middle-level performance
• Advance: With high-performance workloads and better performance
• Enterprise: With full capability and enterprise-level performance