Teradata Corp. is continuing its strategic shift toward supporting unstructured data at MongoDB World 2015 this morning with the addition of support for two new JSON variations to its namesake relational system aimed at accommodating modern web services, particularly those running on the popular document store.

MongoDB is the single most widely-used NoSQL flavor in the cloud with over 10 million downloads to date and thousands of organizations running production clusters. Equipping Teradata Database with the ability to store the native BSON files will help the company target those users..

The enhancement removes the need to perform the conversion into vanilla JSON or vice versa currently required when moving information between the systems, which should makes it that much easier – and thus appealing – to use the two in conjunction. Teradata envisions its platform being used mainly in an auxiliary role as an analytics backend for MongoDB.

That way, organizations can move files from the document store into the company’s platform for advanced analysis without the usual conversion overhead, which can produce significant time savings in the kind of large-scale environments where the Teradata Database is typically used. The entire process is performed using a connector originally announced last year that also works the other way around.

That integration opens the door to much more advanced bi-directional use cases. A customer with, say, a cloud-based visualization service could enrich its BSON files with other data such as UBSON numerics, the second format added as part of the update, and pipe the results back to the application through MongoDB.

That makes it possible to take advantage of both worlds – the flexibility of NoSQL with the time-honed data crunching capabilities of Teradata Database – without as much manual work typically involved in such expansive composite projects. That value proposition should prove particularly appealing to traditional organizations with analysts already trained in using the latter system that are setting out on cloud development projects and want to tap into their existing data assets.

But with revenues down nearly 8 percent from last year as of the first quarter, Teradata also needs to focus on attracting new customers, which will require much more than just improved third party integrations. As a result, we’ll likely see more from the company on that front in the coming months.

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