The technology that exists with Data Mining, Warehousing, Data Marts, and OLAP is comparatively a new term but the technology is not. Data Mining is the process of digging or gathering information from various databases. This includes data from point of sales transactions, credit card purchases, online forms which are just a few of the many things that some of the large companies dig to find out more about their clients. The information is used to find out how major of the clients shopping behavior, or what makes them irritated or simply how can they make the life of the client happier. Since gathering all this information is a necessity in order to increase sales and have a better relationship with clients, and with storage devices becoming cheaper, the idea of warehousing data came into being. This literally means that the data is collected in a central place where it is analyzed and sorted according to the company requirement.
Warehouse at Hackeberga Castle
Data Warehouse Overview
Figure 1: Simple schematic for a data warehouse. T...Data mining is the search for relationships and global patterns that exist in large databases but are `hidden' among the vast amount of data, such as a relationship between patient data and their medical diagnosis. These relationships represent valuable knowledge about the database and the objects in the database and, if the database is a faithful mirror, of the real world registered by the database (Holshemier & Siebes, 1994).
To understand how much data one talks about where storage capacity is concerned. There are trillions of point of sales transactions, credit card purchases, pictures (which are just some types of data that data mining applications pick up) all this are stored in large databases that are measured in bytes. Bytes are the measurement of storage devices. Eight bits make one byte. 1024 bytes make One Kilo Byte and it goes...