Dear Sir,

My heartiest thanks for your honourary services rendered to the knowledge seeking birds.

Sir,

I am an IT professional and working under Oracle 7.3, mainly firing SQLs and doing some part of the DBA viz. Increasing Index/Table size,Creating / modifying and moving of Indexes,Tables etc.

I want some brief guideline on the following area:

1) Data Warehousing 2) Data Mining

Thanks in anticipation of satisfying my query. Ashish

-- Ashish Shah (ashdip@yahoo.com), November 30, 2002

Answers

Here is some useful high level information and some links for further investigation.

According to the "father of the data warehouse," Bill Inmon, a data warehouse is a collection of integrated, subject-oriented databases designed to support the DSS function, where each unit of data is specific to some moment of time. The data warehouse contains atomic data and lightly summarized data." Basically, a data warehouse is a database designed for analytical processing, not transactional processing.

Data mining is the process of discovering heretofore unknown information and patterns lurking within an organization's data. Data mining processes apply heuristic algorithms to historical data to automatically discover patterns in the data. The more data that is available, the better the quality of the data, and the quality of the pattern discovery algorithms determines the value of the data mining applications. So organizations that are deploying data mining tend to store more data for longer periods of time. The key differentiator of data mining over other types of analytical processing is that the computer uses automated algorithms to identify data patterns instead of the more time-consuming human search for patterns.

Check out the following links for more information: http://www.billinmon.com http://www.dw-institute.com/ http://www.olapcouncil.org http://www.datawarehousing.com http://www.tdan.com http://www.rkimball.com http://datawarehouse.ittoolbox.com/

And, of course, http://www.dbazine.com/ch_dw.html

-- Craig S. Mullins (craig_mullins@bmc.com), January 16, 2003.

Thanx for your precious advise.

Good Luck!

Ashish

-- Ashish Shah (ashdip@yahoo.com), January 18, 2003.