Teradata has announced the general availability of Teradata 13, the latest incarnation of its data warehousing software platform.
The product, which was first announced in October, has 93 new features, according to Teradata.
It runs on all members of Teradata's family of specialized appliances.
A major new focus of Teradata 13 is support for geospatial data. This capability allows users to factor in geographic conditions when analyzing large stores of information.
For example, a trucking company could use spatial data to more effectively map routes against customer buying patterns.
Teradata 13 speeds up this process because the geospatial information resides in the same system as other enterprise data, rather than being stored and processed in a separate data mart, according to the vendor.
While geospatial capabilities are far from new, Teradata apparently believes customer demand for them will grow.
Competitor Oracle appears to have the same mindset, recently raising the cost of the Spatial option for its database by about 50 percent.
Meanwhile, Teradata 13 also includes workload management improvements, allowing information to move into data warehouses up to twice as quickly.
In addition, Teradata has updated the software's query optimizer, which determines how to execute users' queries while minimizing the hit to system resources. Query performance has been boosted by up to 30 percent, according to the vendor.
Teradata's announcement comes amid a busy period for the data warehousing and analytics market.
On Monday, competing appliance vendor Netezza announced a faster, lower-cost product called TwinFin, and last week, IBM said it would spend US$1.2 billion to acquire Teradata partner SPSS, maker of predictive analytics software.