Wal-Mart Expands Data Warehouse

Wal-Mart Adds Onto Data Warehouse
NCR’s Teradata division expands a system that links the retail giant with it with vendors.

Wal-Mart has expanded its data warehouse with the help of NCR Corp.’s Teradata division, the companies announced today.

Neither Teradata nor Wal-Mart officials would provide details about the retail giant’s current installation or expansion.

According to the announcement, Teradata’s data warehouse is the foundation of Wal-Mart’s Retail Link decision-support system. Retail Link connects Wal-Mart with its vendors and allows suppliers access to real-time item-level data to improve efficiency.

Earlier this month, Teradata rivals Sun Microsystems and Sybase said they created a data warehouse with more than one trillion rows of data.

“The Sun and Sybase data warehouse can hold enough data to track the history of all world financial trades on all stock exchanges or hold enough data to track all credit (and debit) card transactions in the entire world over the last seven years,” Sun and Sybase said in a statement.

The Sun and Sybase iForce Enterprise Data Warehouse Reference Architecture consists of Sybase IQ, Sun Fire servers and Sun StorEdge storage sub-systems. The system can store 155 terabytes of input data with less than 55 terabytes on the Sun StorEdge system using patented data compression.

The U.S Department of Transportation, American Airlines and Nielsen Media Research are among the first customers that will utilize the new Sun/Sybase technology.