Introduction to SAS/ACCESS Interface to Teradata

Overview

This section describes SAS/ACCESS Interface to Teradata. For a list of SAS/ACCESS features that are available for this interface, see SAS/ACCESS Interface to Teradata: Supported Features.

Note: SAS/ACCESS Interface to Teradata does not support the DBLOAD and ACCESS procedures. The LIBNAME engine technology enhances and replaces the functionality of these procedures. Therefore, you must revise SAS jobs that were written for a different SAS/ACCESS interface and that include DBLOAD or ACCESS procedures before you can run them with SAS/ACCESS Interface to Teradata.

The SAS/ACCESS Teradata Client

Teradata is a massively parallel (MPP) RDBMS. A high-end Teradata server supports many users. It simultaneously loads and extracts table data and processes complex queries.

Because Teradata customers run many processors at the same time for queries of the database, users enjoy excellent DBMS server performance. The challenge to client software, such as SAS, is to leverage Teradata performance by rapidly extracting and loading table data. SAS/ACCESS Interface to Teradata meets this challenge by letting you optimize extracts and loads (reads and creates).

Information throughout this document explains how you can use the SAS/ACCESS interface to optimize DBMS operations:

It can create and update Teradata tables. It supports a FastLoad interface that rapidly creates new table. It can also potentially optimize table reads by using FastExport for the highest possible read performance.
It supports MultiLoad, which loads both empty and existing Teradata tables and greatly accelerates the speed of insertion into Teradata tables.
It supports the Teradata Parallel Transporter (TPT) API on Windows and UNIX. This API uses the Teradata Load, Update, and Stream operator to load data and the export operator to read data.