Enable Teradata Connections

This section provides information on how to enable connection to Teradata databases. 

• Teradata provides Datawarehousing & Analytics solutions and Marketing applications. The Teradata database supports all of their Datawarehousing solutions. For more information, see http://www.teradata.com.

• For more information on supported versions, see Connection Types.

This connection supports reading and writing. You can create multiple Teradata connections in the Designer Cloud application.

Limitations

• By default, Teradata does not permit the publication of datasets containing duplicate rows. Workarounds:

  • Your final statement for any recipe that generates results for Teradata should include a Remove duplicate rows transformation. 

    NOTE: The above transformation removes exact, case-sensitive duplicate rows. Teradata may still prevent publication for case-insensitive duplicates.

  • It's possible to change the default writing method to Teradata to enable duplicate rows. For more information, contact Alteryx Support. 
• When creating custom datasets using SQL from Teradata sources, the ORDER BY clause in standard SQL does not work. This is a known issue.

Download and Install Teradata drivers

To enable connectivity, you must download and install the Teradata drivers into an accessible location on the Alteryx® node.

Steps:

1. If you don't have a Teradata developer account, create one here: https://downloads.teradata.com/user/register
2. Log in to the account. Navigate to http://downloads.teradata.com/download/connectivity/jdbc-driver
3. Download the JDBC driver in ZIP or TAR form.
4. Copy the downloaded ZIP or TAR file to the Alteryx node.
5. Extract and place the JAR file into a folder accessible to the Alteryx user.
6. Verify that the Alteryx user is the owner of the JAR file and its parent folder.
7. You can apply this change through the Admin Settings Page (recommended) or trifacta-conf.json. For more information, see Platform Configuration Methods.
8. Locate the data-service.classpath. To the classpath value add the folder where you installed the JAR file. For the new entry, remember to add the following to the entry:
   1. Add a prefix of :.

   2. Add a suffix of /*.

   3. Example:

      :/opt/trifacta/drivers/*

   4. Whole classpath example:

      "data-service": { ...
      "classpath": "%(topOfTree)s/services/data-service/build/libs/data-service.jar:%(topOfTree)s/services/data-service/build/conf:%(topOfTree)s/services/data-service/build/dependencies/*:/opt/trifacta/drivers/*"

9. Save your changes and restart the platform.

Increase Read Timeout

Particularly when reading from large Teradata tables, you might experience read timeouts in the Designer Cloud application. 

The default setting is 300 seconds (5 minutes). You should consider raising this limit if you are working with large tables.

For more information, see Configure Photon Running Environment. 

Create Teradata Connection

For more information on creating a Teradata connection, see Create Connection Window.

Reference

Connection URL

The properties that you provide are inserted into the following URL, which connects  Designer Cloud Enterprise Edition to the connection:

jdbc:teradata://<host>/DBS_PORT=<port><connect-string-options>

The Connection URL is mostly built up automatically using cluster configuration for the platform.

Connect string options

The connect string options are optional. If you are passing additional properties and values to complete the connection, the connect string options must be structured in the following manner:

,<prop1>=<val1>,<prop2>=<val2>

where:

• <prop> : the name of the property
• <val> : the value for the property

delimiters:

• , : any set of connect string options must begin and end with a comma.
  • A comma can be omitted from the end of the connect string options.
• = : property names and values must be separated with an equal sign (=).

Use SSL

When SSL is enabled for the connection, the following is automatically appended to the connect string options:

,ENCRYPTDATA=ON

Specific database

You can connect to a specific database using the following connect string option:

,DATABASE=<database_name>

If no database is specified, the connect attempts to connect the default database.

Driver Information

This connection uses the following driver:

• Driver name: com.teradata.jdbc.TeraDriver

• Driver version: com.teradata:terajdbc4:16.20.00.13
• Driver documentation: https://developer.teradata.com/connectivity/reference/jdbc-driver

Troubleshooting

Testing

Steps:

1. After you create your connection, load a small dataset based on a table in the connected Teradata database. See Import Data Page. 
2. Perform a few simple transformations to the data. Run the job. See Transformer Page.
3. Verify the results.

For more information, see Verify Operations.