Analytics veteran Teradata revealed Teradata Database 14 today.  The latest version of its offerings features a number of major new additions, including security enhancements, broader supports for data formats and more.

Scott Gnau, president Teradata Labs, said, “This dramatically improves the data warehouse’s overall performance and manageability. Teradata has always been second to none in terms of speed and ease of use – with Teradata Database 14, we extend that leadership.”

The first new addition to Teradata Database is revamped workload management in the form of virtual partitions that allocate resources between business units within a company. V14 also avoids repeated decompression processing to boost efficiency, and is also the first virtual storage offering that’s designed to use “hot” data more often than “cold” data, according to the company.

Another advantage is that the offering can also ‘sync’ with a customer’s schedule to automatically carry out jobs based on time. This comes with the access-based Teradata Row Level Security function and the ability to migrate apps and data from competing platforms. There are 14 new functions that are designed to help users do that, including support for ARRAY and NUMBER data types and coding shourtcuts including regular expression functions.

The first beta of v14 will roll out in December this year.

Teradata has an aggressive growth strategy, which involved the acquisition of two major data analytics solution providers.  They have a good reason though – the big data market is getting competitive, and it’s not the only taking this route as Jeff Kelly highlighted in the Wikibon blog.

Karmasphere is one example of that. It launched the latest version of its offering, Karmasphere Analyst Big Data just yesterday. It puts an emphasis on what the company has been specializing in: creating an accessible and rounded-out UI for developers working with big data.