In the old days, big data used to be called data warehousing. But that was when corporations stored all their own data on their own servers. Today, it’s just called big data and it generally refers to the vast reaches of data in the cloud. Old big data is buying new big data today, as data warehousing powerhouse Teradata just announced it will be acquiring Aster Data Systems for $263 million.

Teradat already owns an 11 percent stake in Aster Data, which it bought last September. The $263 million, which is “net of debt and other expenses,” will purchase the remaining 89 percent, giving Aster Data a final valuation of $295 million. ASter Data has raised $53 million from Sequoia, First Round Capital, and IVP. Ron Conway, David Cheriton, and Anand Rajaraman were angel investors.

Just last September, the company raised $30 million. As we described back then:

Aster Data makes products that help manage and analyze very large sets of data, solving problems that standard databases may not be able to cope with. One of Aster’s core products is nCluster, which the company describes as a massively parallel (MPP) database with an analytics engine baked in. Aster Data’s clients include comScore, LinkedIn, and MySpace

Aster Data also specializes in analyzing data that is unstructured (i.e., it is not stored neatly in a database, but maybe is just out in the open Web). It’s revenues have been doubling every year. Big data is big business.

