What does the Parallel Database Extensions (PDE) allow Teradata to achieve?

The Parallel Database Extensions (PDE) in Teradata play a crucial role in enabling the database to operate in a parallel processing environment. This capability is essential for efficiently handling large volumes of data and complex queries, as it allows multiple processes, or virtual processors (vprocs), to execute simultaneously.

By leveraging parallelism, Teradata can improve performance significantly, especially in data retrieval and processing tasks, by dividing workloads across different vprocs. Each vproc can handle its part of the workload independently, which prevents bottlenecks and leads to faster query responses and better overall resource utilization.

The other choices do not accurately reflect the capabilities of the PDE. If Teradata operated in a sequential manner or managed workloads linearly, it would limit its performance and scalability, making it less effective in environments where large datasets and complex queries are common. Archiving data is not the primary function of PDE; instead, it focuses on enhancing processing capabilities through parallel execution.