TechBytes: Vantage - Teradata Integrated Workload Management Part 2

This is Carrie Ballinger, and welcome to Teradata TechBytes. I’d like to spend next few minutes with you talking about the Teradata Integrated Workload Management offering. This is your basic bundling of Workload Management. So let’s spend a couple of minutes on the priority options you have with Teradata Integrated Workload Management. With SLES 11 operating system, all of the different priorities are organized in a hierarchy with the highest priority components higher in the structure and lower priority ones lower in the structure. You get two different levels of priority – You get a tactical level which is a super priority, which is capable of giving practically all the resources on a platform to any tactical workloads you have defined. This is very important that you’d be careful how you use that tactical tier. You may not be supporting any tactical applications. But if you were to put work in tactical you want to make sure it’s very light, very short and it’s not resource intensive because it’s such a powerful location. It is such an important location that has its own built–in workload exceptions that demote any query that’s running in tactical down to a lower priority if it consumes more than a small amount of resources. So this is there for the protection of the tactical tier. The bulk of the workloads are intended to be running in what we call timeshare which is at the base this priority hierarchy. And the timeshare tier has four priority divisions – It has a top, a high, a medium, and a low. There are four main priority divisions in a timeshare level: There’s top, high, medium, and low. We call these access levels and each of them has their own access rates. The purpose of the access rates is to determine the percent or the level of resources that each query is going to receive compared to queries that are running in some of the different access levels. For example, any query that’s running in the top access level which has a rate of 8 will receive eight times the resources of any queries running in the low access rate, because the low queries only have an access rate of one while the top queries have an access rate or eight. Any query running in the top access level will have double the resources offered to it compared to any query that’s running in the high access rate because the ratio of rates is 2 to 1, and so forth. So, the division of resources within the timeshare depends completely on the access rate of the access level where the query’s workload resides. Another interesting feature – helpful feature – in regard to Workload Management is the ability to automate the change of priorities or the change in the throttle limits by time of day. And you set this up in Teradata Integrated Workload Management by defining different planned environments. In this example that we’re looking at here, there’s an “Online State” which might be from 8 to 5 that belongs to one planned environment. And there is a “Nigh or Weekend State” – A state is a bundling of the resource in Priority Scheduler and workload management options. So we have night and weekend state to reflect a second planned environment, and there’s a third planned environment for month–end processing where you might want to give a lot of high priority to one or two of your workloads to get work through the system. So this can be very helpful for managing load windows, or particular times when the business needs a shift in priorities and change made what the throttle limits are. So we’ve talked about workloads, we’ve talked about filters and throttles, we’ve talked about the classification criteria that links these to the queries that are entering the Teradata database ready to run. And we’ve talked about some of the new features and opportunities that are available with Teradata Integrated Workload Management, including automatically changing some of your settings by time of day and being able to prioritize the delayed queue. There’s also a very simple GUI interface, a Viewpoint portlet, which is available to do all the setup and any changes you might want going forward to your Workload Management settings. I want to close by mentioning that the other bundling of Workload Management criteria is the same thing we’ve talked about in this TechBytes with the addition of a few other features – And I want to just list those off so that you have a clear sense of differentiation between full TASM and what you get on the Teradata Integrated Workload Management. In full TASM, you get an additional priority level called SLG Tiers, which allow you to set specific allocations of a resource to specific workloads. This is intended for cases where you’ve got different types of workloads that have service level goals associated with them, and you want to have more complex mix of work. The other difference is on the full TASM bundling of features you get Workload Management Capacity on Demand as well as the ability to set hard limits on the workloads and the virtual partitions. And you also get more than one virtual partition on full TASM. In TIWM you only get one. The other thing is, all of the workloads in full TASM can have workload exceptions, while in TIWM it’s just tactical workloads that have workload exceptions. So, thank you for joining me in this quick discussion of the Teradata Integrated Workload Management offering.