The main drawback is that the currently available Teradata Express Edition 12.0 supports only 32-bit Windows (the installer will raise an error just after start on 64-bit Windows) and we all have 64-bit machines nowadays, most of them have 64-bit Windows installed with at least 4 GB RAM, so you would have to be crazy to actually downgrade your setup back to 32-bit only to play with Teradata but... this is where the magic of virtualization software come to help.
The solution is easy:
- download your favorite virtual machine, ie. VirtualBox or VMware
- set up a virtual machine with 32-bit Windows (ie. Windows XP) as a guest system
- download Teradata Express Edition 12.0
- install Teradata Express on your virtual machine
- and... voila, you will have Teradata ready to work on your 64-bit host Windows!
Please also note that:
- a virtual image with preinstalled Teradata Express Edition hosted by 32-bit Windows is a convenient way to prepare and spread a single development environment for your development team
- it might be convienient to configure the networking in your virtual machine as a bridged networking not a NAT, so your Teradata database will be accessible from other physical machines in your network
- you really do not have to worry about performance penalty related to virtualization: Teradata Express Edition is not optimized for performance anyway (and I mean it!), so please use it as a fully functional Teradata version but don't care about the performance figures much