Data warehouse veteran Teradata and NoSQL rising star MongoDB are joining forces in a landmark partnership to provide a new and flexible way for application developers to harness the growing amounts of fast-moving information coming out of the connected universe. As part of the alliance, the firms are developing a two-way connector that will link their respective offerings with a common JSON interface.

JSON, or JavaScript Object Notation, has become the de facto standard for sharing real-time data between web services thanks to its simplicity, supportability and the fact that it makes more efficient use of hardware resources than the more conventional XML language.  MongoDB is built from the ground up to take advantage of that feature set. The open-source document database uses a variation of JSON to represent queries and stores files in BSON, a binary variation of the format that provides a broader range of value types.

Teradata, for its part, provides support for JSON  through its QueryGrid software.

The solution, which was introduced in April alongside the newest version of the company’s flagship data warehouse, makes it possible to run the same query across multiple sources instead of having to natively replicate the request in each environment. That significantly reduces the amount of work that goes into the retrieval process while eliminating the risk of inconsistencies that may cause issues later in analytics lifecycle.

Advantages to JSON via QueryGrid

Another major advantage of the product is that it pushes queries down to the target system instead of physically pulling in the data, functionality that gives customers the freedom to choose the best tool for the job.

If the workload happens to be implemented in JSON, then developers will be able to utilize the newly announced connector to import it from MongoDB into their backend warehouse environments with a single request, all while sticking to the native format. As Teradata’s Scott Gnau explained in an interview on SiliconANGLE’s theCUBE, the latter in itself is a major plus.

“Storing detailed data in the native format enables the best world-class analytics, we’ve seen that happen as long as my crew has been in the traditional data space,” Scott Gnau, who heads product development for the company, said.

Application side

The benefits are even greater on the application side.  Through the integration, services running against MongoDB  will be able to relegate data to a warehouse for advanced analysis and combine the resulting insights with fresh information as it comes in to deliver a better user experience. A congestion management system system, for example, might leverage the connector to predict traffic patterns, address them, and analyze data from sensors in the field to perform further optimizations on-the-fly.

The integration between MongoDB and Teradata falls into step with the broader industry trend of combining real-time streams with historical data. The firms are going up against the likes of HP, which offers the integrated HAVEn bundle, and EMC and VMware spin-off Pivotal with its Pivotal HD platform.