How FastLoad Works

What makes FastLoad perform so well when it is loading millions or even billions of rows? It is because FastLoad assembles data into 64K blocks (64,000 bytes) to load it and can use multiple sessions simultaneously, taking further advantage of Teradata's parallel processing.

This is different from BTEQ and TPump, which load data at the row level.It takes full advantage of Teradata's parallel architecture. In fact, FastLoad will create a Teradata session for each AMP (Access Module Processor — the software processor in Teradata responsible for reading and writing data to the disks) in order to maximize parallel processing. This advantage is passed along to the FastLoad user in terms of awesome performance. Teradata is the only data warehouse loads data, processes data and backs up data in parallel.