Metadata never loads from Teradata

[ramcewan]

Version 11.1 R7 (LTS), on premise

While attempting to bring in a new table from Teradata the metadata load never completes.
Even if we wait several days when we look at the Schema name in the below path it shows the spinning broken circle.

Manage > Data server connection > Connections >  Schemas 

Attempting to cancel the metadata import does nothing. We have tried turning off the fetch sample data option still nothing.

We are able to import metadata from other sources (SQL Server, Oracle, Tibco Data Virtualization) but Teradata is still giving us a problem. 

I should mention we have a huge Teradata environment (one of the largest I have heard) and we often find it very hard to import metadata in Framework without creating the object manually with a SQL statement including a filtered where clause.

When we have successfully gotten metadata in before the data modules work just fine with Teradata as does the Framework package, it is just the initial import that is problematic.

[bus_pass_man]

If you experience such problems, turn off samping when you load the metadata.  The trade-off for that is the columns of your schema will not have been analysed for smarts and things such as the represents properties, where columns which are time or geographic concepts are labeled as such and the reporting applications can use that to auto-generate maps etc., will be missing.

What the UI doesn't really indicate very well is that when you load the metadata you are actually loading it for every table which has been selected, not just new ones.  If you have a large number of tables that can be a lengthy process.  It is probably best to have a fairly stable data warehouse before loading the metadata and load the metadata once.

As for the FM problem you mention, the primary purpose of importing tables from a data base into FM in the select * from table syntax is that the metadata is stored in the FM model and unnecessary metadata callbacks can be avoided in many cases.  If those objects are missing, as, if I correctly understand what you have said, in your case, where you are manually creating data source query subjects with a syntax of select * from table where ... , then you could end up with the query engine making metadata callbacks.  I'm not quite sure why, if the number of objects in your db causes metadata import problems in FM, you are creating the query subjects manually with the filters in the SQL. It is possible that there might be an alternative.

One question I would have is, how many is 'huge'? What are all those tables used for? Is it a reasonably designed data warehouse?  That's three actually.

[ramcewan]

It is the national data warehouse of a fortune company with 20+ million customers and over 100k employees covering all aspects of the business. It was designed using 3 tier inman methodology and contains several thousand tables at last count.   

We will try turning off sampling, thanks.