Teradata Senior Consultant

5/2002 – 12/2008

Providing Teradata lead technical consultancy for Vodafone Germany based in Duesseldorf, Germany. This customer had the largest Teradata configuration in the EMEA region and was at one point 168 nodes (120 Terabytes) now 108 of the latest version nodes. This was a Teradata/Unix environment. Responsibilities included:

- Database design/Physical Modelling/PPI design/Index strategy
- Performance tuning/Data Type analysis/Space optimisation
- Query analysis/Design/SQL performance optimisation
- Database administration
- NPARC Teradata data transfer tool and environment maintenance
- Teradata Automatic Data Compression Analysis
- Workload management
- Teradata Archive/Recovery
- Knowledge transfer to the local team
- Support and implementation of Teradata utilities (Fastload/Multiload/FastExport/SQL Assistant, Arcmain, BTEQ...)

11/1996 – 4/2002

Providing Teradata lead technical consultancy for Telekom Austria.

Directed, designed and managed the Proof of Concept/Benchmark project on behalf of NCR Teradata, beating IBM and Tandem which led to the sale of the Teradata system to Telekom Austria. This was followed by an upgrade 3 years later which doubled the size of the system.

The data warehouse was connected to an IBM MVS environment as well as Unix. Main responsibilities included Call Data Record design, transformation and management in the data warehouse. Other responsibilities included Database design/Physical Modelling, ETL design, Performance optimisation, SQL design & tuning, Archive/Restore strategy design, Data transformation design, Teradata Load Utilities and Database administration. In parallel, consultancy was provided to D2 Vodafone in Germany, Metro (Retailer) in Germany, and Otto Versand (Retailer) in Germany, Thyssen Krupp (Retail/Manufacturing) in Germany, and Mobilkom Austria (wireless provider).

• Designed and developed the tool called TeraXtract. This tool is specifically designed to extract, migrate or automate archiving data from Teradata systems to other Teradata systems and into other platforms such as S/390 DB2, UDB/AIX. The tool automates the very large task of producing the scripts for such migrations. TeraXtract produces all FastExport, Teradata Archive, DB2 DDL, Optiload, DB2 Load and associated JCL for the migration of platforms.

• Designed and developed an automated data compression tool. This tool is specifically designed to optimise the use of storage on Teradata systems. The tool automates the analysis of space utilisation in a Teradata system, and provides recommendations for re-engineering Teradata physical tables to reclaim poorly used storage. For any accepted recommendations the tool generates all code necessary to realise the optimisations and recover poorly utilised storage. Client experiences have been overwhelmingly positive. Typical results have been the recovery of multiple terabytes of storage (allowing the deferral or avoidance of costly Teradata upgrades), as well as improved query performance and system throughput coming from more efficient physical tables.

• 3 months (2001) providing lead technical consultant for a platform migration project in Germany for Sparda Bank in Nuernberg. The project involved the migration of a Teradata DWH to DB2 EEE (UDB). This was a Teradata /IBM MVS environment.

• 2 months (2000) providing Data Warehouse architectural and platform evaluation services to NTL which was the UK’s largest cable, internet and media company.

• 1 month (1998) providing a data warehouse database design review and performance audit at Air France located in Paris. This entailed performance analysis on an NCR4700 system running Teradata V2R3 in a Unix environment. Produced and presented recommendations and demonstrable test scenarios to significantly improve performance and efficiency of the system.

2/1996 – 10/1996

Providing lead technical consultancy to British Airways for their Teradata migration project moving from Teradata V1 to Teradata V2. This was the first such migration in Europe and was a Teradata/IBM MVS environment.

• Set up Teradata V2 system with correct system software
• Design migration plan for Production and Development environments
• Perform test physical model migration analysing reserved words/syntax compliancy including Teradata dictionary/catalogue changes
• Design backup for production and development environments
• Test backup and Restore processes
• Perform SQL performance tests on Teradata V1 systems
• Migrate Production and Development environments
• Perform SQL performance tests on Teradata V2 systems
• Monitor production processes on Teradata V2 for any anomalies.
• Final performance optimisation and SQL new feature implementation.

5/1995 – 1/1996

Providing lead technical consultancy for the first implementation phases of the Union Bank of Norway data warehouse in Oslo.
Responsibilities included Teradata database/physical design, mapping data sources to targets, ETL process design including Teradata Load utilities, Backup/Recovery process design, SQL design and performance optimisation.

In addition, part of a team designing a customer campaign contact management system and the associated Teradata physical subject area.

9/1993 – 3/1995

Providing lead technical consultancy at ABN AMRO Bank in the Netherlands based in Amsterdam. The project was the first Teradata customer in the Netherlands and included working directly with the direct marketing department of the bank.

Directed, designed and managed the Proof of Concept/Benchmark project on behalf of NCR beating Sybase and Oracle which led to the sale of the Teradata system to ABN AMRO.

Responsibilities included Teradata Physical design, SQL design/optimisation hand-in-hand with the business users, Data source to target mapping, data loading from several source systems, data cleaning, data matching and merging.

This was a Teradata/Unix environment.

6/1993 – 8/1993

Providing lead consultancy to NCR Singapore’s Teradata customers in the region such as United Overseas Bank and Central Provident Fund. Responsibilities included Fault report consolidation and resolution, Performance/SQL optimisation, Physical design reviews and knowledge transfer.

9/1992 – 5/1993

Providing lead consultancy to the Teradata pre-sales office of NCR Belgium. Pre-sales activities included those at Kredit Bank, General Banque and Eurocontrol. Responsibilities included producing technical presentations, technical responses to prospective client questions, reference visits and general Teradata architectural overviews.

5/1988 – 8/1992

Principal consultant with Teradata Corporation (UK) of which 2 years spent as Technical Account Manager for Teradata Corporation (UK) at TSB bank which was one of the UK’s largest retail banks (now merged with Lloyds Bank). This included physical database design consultancy for the data warehouse implementation, design and performance reviews, technical and user training. Technical environment covered IBM MVS, Teradata and Microsoft Windows.

Additionally during 5 years with Teradata Corporation (UK), responsibilities included Account Management, team management, systems consultancy, systems engineering, benchmarking, data investigation and technical support. 2 years of this time was spent with British Telecom. Responsible for designing and implementing a large MVS/Teradata data warehouse for Customer And Site Data Analysis (CASDA) and Customer Data Information System (CDIS) at the client. I performed major contributions to the design of a large marketing database at the client. The majority of the time was spent with customers and their users.