Teradata released a white paper today highlighting the release of Viewpoint, a Web 2.0 based portal for managing their data warehouse offering. If it lives up to the hype from the 2007 Partner’s conference it will be a welcomed replacement to out-dated Teradata Manager offering. Viewpoint is based on the technologies behind many other Web 2.0 offerings, including JavaScript and AJAX to provide end users with a fairly customizable and clean user interface.

Out of the box, Viewpoint provides Teradata customers with a 11 portlets that target a combination of end users, DBA’s, and manager. These portlets provide users with visibility to their current queries, the current capacity heatmap , current problem queries, current system health, and as well as a handful of other portlets. Also included with Viewpoint is a Portlet Development Kit (PDK) that allows third parties the ability to develop their own portlets. It would be nice to see Teradata provide a library section on their website of approved third party portlets.