Three Years Down Under

“Ambition leads me not only farther than any other man has been before me, but as far as I think it possible for man to go.”

– Captain James Cook, 1774

Captain James Cook charted the east coast of Australia in 1770 and sailed farther south than anyone before him. He mapped the way for everything that came after.

Three years ago, one of Australia’s Big Four banks set its own course with Nexus Query Chameleon. Its DBA team runs a large Teradata system, and it found a way to take that system farther with less. Captain Cook needed a ship and a compass. This team just needed Nexus, and it’s been smooth sailing Down Under ever since.

Less Is More

“Less is more.”

– Ludwig Mies van der Rohe

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe was one of the great architects of the twentieth century. His glass-and-steel towers, like the Seagram Building in New York, proved that taking things away can make a building stronger and more beautiful.

Nexus SmartCompress brings the same idea to Teradata tables. It looks at the data in each column, finds the values that repeat the most, and builds Teradata multi-value compression for you. The common values are stored once in the table header, and each row keeps only a tiny pointer instead of the full value. The data stays exactly the same, the tables take less space, and users run the same SQL as before. For this bank, SmartCompress has saved real money. Mies built skyscrapers with less. This bank builds a leaner warehouse, and that’s architecture you can bank on.

The Hard Work, Done for You

“I have made this longer than usual because I have not had time to make it shorter.”

– Blaise Pascal, 1657

Blaise Pascal built one of the first mechanical calculators, the Pascaline, when he was still a teenager. He knew that making something shorter takes real work.

Doing multi-value compression by hand takes real work too. A DBA has to study each column, count the most common values, choose up to 255 of them, and write the COMPRESS clauses table by table. SmartCompress does that analysis for you. Smaller tables mean fewer data blocks to read, so full table scans have less ground to cover. Pascal didn’t have time to make it shorter. With SmartCompress, your DBAs do, and they get the weekend back.

More Than Compression

“It is not the mountain we conquer but ourselves.”

– Sir Edmund Hillary

Sir Edmund Hillary, a beekeeper from New Zealand, and Tenzing Norgay became the first people confirmed to reach the summit of Mount Everest in 1953.

SmartCompress is only the first peak. Every Nexus user gets every feature, with no add-ons to buy: queries across Teradata, Oracle, Snowflake, BigQuery, Databricks, and more, with a tab for each system and result sets you can join together; migration between all systems at full speed; the Super Join Builder for federated joins; Cloud Drop; GitHub Integration; Federated Notebooks; BIcandy dashboards; and more than 100 themes. Microsoft OEM’d Nexus from 2009 to 2012 and gave it to its customers. On every database, Nexus is on top of the world.

That’s Compression

“That’s not a knife. That’s a knife.”

– Crocodile Dundee, 1986

Paul Hogan’s Crocodile Dundee became one of the most successful Australian films ever and taught the whole world to say “G’day.”

If your Teradata tables are getting too big for their boots, ask for a 30-minute demo. We’ll run SmartCompress on your own tables and show you the space it can save. If you’d rather try it yourself, ask for a free trial. Other tools say they shrink your data. With SmartCompress, that’s not compression. THIS is compression.

Email Tom Coffing at Tom.Coffing@CoffingDW.com and put “Nexus demo” or “Nexus trial” in the subject line.

Nexus Query Chameleon: The Intersection of All Data.