"The Teradata 5550 builds upon the proven success of our previous enterprise-class platforms, recognized as the 'gold standard for data warehousing' in the industry. The Teradata 5550 and our latest Teradata 12 database provide up to two times the system performance compared to our previous platform and database release," said Lea. "With the Teradata 5550, we continue to provide customers more power and functionality at a lower price. And over time, with data volumes exploding and new data types, such as unstructured text and RFID data, becoming increasingly important, the combined capabilities of our new Teradata 5550 and Teradata 12 database offer customers unprecedented price performance and easier than ever manageability."

Teradata 12, the market-leading enterprise data warehouse database, has been designed to meet the high performance business intelligence and analytical needs of complex reporting and ad-hoc analysis. A few of the innovations in Teradata 12 include consistent and predictable responses from advanced mixed workload management and continuous data loading as well as smarter query execution with the new Teradata Optimizer which dynamically rewrites poorly written queries in real-time and helps queries run up to 30 percent faster. In addition, "intelligent scanning" with multi-level partition indexing can greatly improve query response times, extending the performance edge for which Teradata is known.

Since the Teradata 12 database is the foundation of all the Teradata platforms, customers can migrate to more powerful systems without costly changes to data models, queries or applications. Customers can also leverage existing resources and tools. Database administrators, system administrators, and application developers can support multiple Teradata systems without additional training.