Another Appliance with Geospatial Support

Just a day after Netezza announced its spatial extension for its appliance, Teradata (one “r”) notes (press release) it too has such support: “The Teradata 12 software foundation provides full features and advanced functionality for traditional analytic needs while also providing uniquely sophisticated extensions for newly emerging requirements like geospatial, in-database mining, and data encryption.” I found no explanation of the geospatial extension on the company website, only the download (Teradata Geospatial Extension, 34 Mb pdf).

DBMS2 looked at the claims and notes “Teradata thinks its geospatial data management capability is better than competitors’, and that this is an important indicator of Teradata’s general overall greater sophistication.”

Ok, so we have a war of words. My suggestion to the appliance companies: If you want to sell these appliances within the geospatial community, you may want to do a bit more to educate us on what these things are and we need one in the first place. Perhaps the BI folks and some IT folks are very familiar with appliances, I’m not sure the hardcore geospatial practitioners are.