Day 1 of the 2011 Teradata Partners User Group Conference and Expo at San Diego was very educational and I had the opportunity to listen to some very good sessions. During the morning session, I attended a  workshop on “Teradata Live”, an End to End demo by Lance Miller from Teradata. This demo was done on a 8GB Memory,2TB, TD 13.10,4AMP configuration. Lance showed a logical data model for retail customers and the data distribution for 150 million row sales table. He pulled the Teradata Administrator view and showed how the data was evenly distributed on 4 amps. Lance also demonstrated the Teradata Miner 5.0  which is used for data profiling. During this session I asked a question on whether they have any data to support benchmarks against competitors either IBM's Netezza or Oracle Exadata.

This week I'm taking a break from my current series of top 10 web application vulnerabilities. Instead, I'll be talking about my experiences at ShmooCon (http://www.shmoocon.org/), an annual IT security conference in DC that has a very similiar feel to the (in)famous DefCon. As usual, ShmooCon was a whole-weekend experience, with lots of things going on besides the official talks: many different contests, vendor booths, lock-picking tutorials, you name it... Throw in about two feet of snow that fell in DC the Saturday of the con, and things start becoming even more interesting! In fact, I was very lucky to get out of town on Monday thanks to a fellow CapTecher who was headed back to Richmond by car.