Teradata Express 14.10 for VMware Player User Guide

Teradata Express for VMware Player (TDE-V) is a free, fully operational Teradata Virtual Machine with up to one terabyte of storage. Imagine being able to install a fully operational Teradata database on your PC and be running queries in five minutes, easy as 1-2-3.

After installing VMware Server/Player and downloading your choice of VM, this is all it takes:

1. Install the VM
2. Start the VM and Teradata
3. Use the Teradata Studio Express to run queries

To help you load data, the new Teradata EZLoader utility is included in the VM.

Depending upon your needs and the resources available on your PC, two versions of Teradata Express14.10 are available at this time. Please note that the resources needed for Teradata Express are in addition to those needed by the operating system on your PC:

• TD Express 14.10 with 40GB of storage with SLES 11 and without Viewpoint requires 2.0 GB of RAM for the Virtual Machine and can run on a host machine with 4 GB of RAM.
• TD Express 14.10 with 1TB of storage with SLES 10 and Viewpoint requires 4.0 GB of RAM for the Virtual Machine and therefore needs a host machine with 8GB of RAM.

A 64-bit virtualization-capable PC is required.  VMware provides a utility to check your system for 64 bit support at this link.

Please note that while the Teradata Express family of products is not officially supported, you can talk to other users and get help in the Cloud Computing forum. Note also that Japanese-language instructions for configuring TDE-V are available for download in PDF format.

Getting Started

The first task is to make sure you have a system capable of handling VMware and VM’s. There are plenty of details on the VMware site but here are some basic requirements that you should be aware of before getting started:

1. Since the SLES VM’s are 64-bit, your CPU must support 64-bit operation.
2. Your CPU must also support Virtualization. Generally there is a BIOS setting which enables this. Google the topic for your particular CPU for more information but most recent PC’s support both 64-bit and Virtualization.

As soon as you determine your system supports the requirements you can proceed:

It's time to run VMware Player and start Teradata Express.  From the VMware Player Welcome page, choose "Open a Virtual Machine" and click your way through your file directory to the Teradata Express folder, looking for the "TDExpress14.10_sles10.vmx" or "TDExpress14.10_sles11.vmx"file.   

Figure 1. Loading the TD Express virtual machine in VMware Player

I MOVED IT!

This step is very important.  As you click through the virtual image directories, VMware is looking for the .vmx file, in order to start the image.  Once you find it, double-click or choose the 'Open' option.  VMware will now present you with a dialog box asking if you copied or moved this image.  Be sure to choose  'I MOVED IT'!

1. VMware Player and VMware Server are both available for free download from the VMware site and both will work. This tutorial describes using VMware Server (hosted on a Windows system). If you have not already done so, make your choice and install VMware on your system.
2. Disk space is a big consideration. 40GB and 1TB versions of TD Express are available depending on your resources and need. Typically you don't actually need the full amount of available disk space (although this would be advisable) to install and get started. Also, isolating VM’s on their own physical disks (if available) can improve performance. Some additional information about disk space is provided below.
3. Download the appropriate TD Express image from the downloads section.
4. If you do not already have 7-zip download it here
5. Create a directory on your C:\ drive named "virtual-machinesvirtual-machines". After unzipping (7-zip) the file you will end up with something like “C:\virtual-machines\TD14..”.
6. Now you need to add the VM to the VMware inventory. Using VMware Player (see Figure 1 above for reference):
   1. Click on Open A Virtual Machine
   2. Drill down under inventory, highlight the folder and item in contents (TDExpress14.10_sles11.vmx), OK
7. The VM will show up in the Library under the Home tab and can be started and stopped from there.
8. Double click on the TD Express image to start.
9. Login into the SLES VM with username rootand password root. root/root
10. Wait. The image will take some time to initialize.
11. Test with bteq (bteq is the standard Teradata command line query tool. It can be invoked from the Linux command line in the Gnome window as follows.
    1. From the shell prompt:TDExpress14.0_Sles10:~ # bteq
    2. When asked for your logon: .logon 127.0.0.1/dbc
    3. When asked for your password: dbc
    4. You should now be in the bteq session (you'll see a message *** Logon successfully completed).
    5. Now, let's execute some SQL. You should see results similar to below except the version will be 14.10.00.02:

       select * from dbcinfo;
       
        *** Query completed. 3 rows found. 2 columns returned.
        *** Total elapsed time was 1 second.
       
       InfoKey                        InfoData
       ------------------------------ --------------------------------------------
       LANGUAGE SUPPORT MODE          Standard
       RELEASE                        14.00.00.01
       VERSION                        14.00.00.01
       

    6. And you can now quit bteq by executing: quit

Figure 2. Testing Teradata using BTEQ

If you are running the SLES 11 image without Viewpoint, skip over this next section and go right to Loading Data.

Monitoring Teradata Express using Viewpoint

You have the option of running Viewpoint on TD Express 14.10 with the 1TB, SLES 10 image only. To see all you can do with Viewpoint look here.

To login to Viewpoint follow the steps below.

1. You need to start Firefox to run Viewpoint. Look for the "Computer" tab in the lower left hand corner of your VMware Player desktop. Under the "Applications" tab you see the icon to start Firefox.
   
   



2. Wait. Firefox can take several minutes to initialize. Even if you have sufficient VRAM allocated, you will have heavy CPU and disk I/O traffic. Just wait, it will come up.
   
   


3. The Login information is pre-populated for you. Just hit "Sign In".
4. The Set Up screen is already pre-populated for you. Hit "Back to Portal" to get from this screen to the main dashboard.
   
   


5. You are now ready to add portlets to your dashboard.
   
   
   

Loading Data

On the Teradata version 14.0 VM’s the new EZloader utility is included for fast and easy data loads. Here's an example of loading some data from a comma-separated file (i.e.. a CSV). From BTEQ, run the following:

CREATE user vmtest AS password=vmtest perm=524288000 spool=524288000;


CREATE SET TABLE vmtest.test ,
NO FALLBACK , 
NO BEFORE JOURNAL, 
NO AFTER JOURNAL, 
CHECKSUM = DEFAULT ( 
Test_field1 INTEGER,
Test_field2 INTEGER)
PRIMARY INDEX ( Test_field1 );

Create a file called testwith contents that look something like this:

1,1
2,2
3,3

Run the load utility:

/opt/teradata/client/13.0/tbuild/bin/tdload -f test -u vmtest -p vmtest -t test

That is it, data loaded!

Running Queries

You can use the Teradata Studio Express to run queries against the database. You can learn more about Teradata Studio Express, and download Teradata Studio Express versions for various platforms. Finally...

Please note that while Teradata Express for VMware is a free, unsupported product, you can talk to other users and ask for help over in the Cloud Computing forum.