How do you define Teradata? Give some of the primary characteristics of the same.

Scalable - Highly parallel (AMP architecture) MPP system. Fault Tolerant with no single point of failure (HSN).

Super Workload management - (TASM) high concurrency (active user count). Very Secure ( Access model)  

Maximum performance when data is distributed evenly across AMPs

•Teradata is a relational database management system (RDBMS) that is:•Teradata is an open system, running on a UNIX MP-RAS or Windows server platform.•Teradata is capable of supporting many concurrent users from various client platforms.•Teradata is compatible with industry standards (ANSI compliant).•Teradata is completely built on a parallel architecture.

Features:

Teradata supports more larger warehouse data than all competitors combined. 

• Teradata Database can scale from 100 gigabytes to over 100+ petabytes of data on a single system without losing any performance .This is called Scalability.
• Provides a parallel-aware Optimizer that makes query tuning unnecessary to get a query to run.
• Automatic and even data distribution eliminates complex indexing schemes or time-consuming reorganizations .
• Teradata Database can handle the most concurrent users, who are often running multiple, complex queries. 
• Designed and built with parallelism.
• Supports ad-hoc queries using SQL
• Single point of control for the DBA (Teradata Manager).
• Unconditional parallelism (parallel architecture)
• Teradata provides the lowest total cost (TCO) of ownership
• High availability of data because there is no single point of failure - fault tolerance is built-in to the system. 

• Enterprise data warehousing 
• Active data warehousing 
• Customer relationship management 
• Internet and E­Business
• Data marts

The Teradata Database is a relational database management system (RDBMS) that drives a company's data warehouse. TheTeradata Database is accessed using SQL (Structured Query Language), the industry standard access language for communicating with an RDBMS. The ability to manage largeamounts of data is accomplished using the concept of parallelism, wherein many individual processors perform smaller tasks concurrently to accomplish an operation against a largerepository of data. To date, only parallel architectures can handle databases of this size.

Teradata is basically a database used to drive OLAP,OLTP, Datawarehouse etc.It has a a built in parallel system. TPT(Teradata Parallel Trasnsport), MLOAD are some interactive utilities offered by Teradata which eases the loading of records into tables. In new version of Teradata (15.0), the JSON data also can be stored.

Some of the newly developed features of Teradata are: 

• Automated temporal analytics
• Extension in the compression capabilities which allows flexible compression of data about times more data than the previous version.
• Customer associated innovation like tetradata viewpoint.

Teradata is basically an RDMS which is used to drive the Datamart, Datawarehouse, OLAP, OLTP, as well as DSS Appliances of the company. Some of the primary characteristics of Teradata are given below.

• Is capable of running on Single-nodes, as well as multi-nodes.
• Parallelism is built into the system.
• Very much compatible with the standards of ANSI.
• Tends to act in the same way as a server.
• It is an Open System that basically executes for UNIX MR-RAS, Suse Linux ETC, WIN2K, etc.