Data Mining and Warehousing
Data mining and warehousing is the process of combining key data from
multiple systems for the sole purpose of analysis. data mining
and warehousing provides businesses with an easily accessible store
of critical data that is often used to enable business intelligence
- the analysis, reporting and charting of data for the purpose of understanding
key drivers to the business and key activities that have impact on
the business. As with many data intensive technologies, data
mining and warehousing has its roots in the Enterprise world, but there
are tools now available to small and mid-sized businesses that make
the use of data mining and warehousing significantly more approachable
and possible for the smaller organization. In order to understand
how to use data mining and warehousing successfully one must first
understand the driving factors that led to the creation of the technology
in the first place.
The Need for Data Mining and Warehousing
The requirement for data mining and warehousing was born out of the
need to analyze business data. As large enterprise organizations
began to collect vast amounts of data on their customers, their vendors
and their business, they realized that in that data were hidden key
trends, indicators and patterns that if discovered and understood would
help them manage their business. Data mining was the first of
the two applications deployed and it provided businesses with the ability
to analyze vast amounts of data for the purpose of identifying trends. Unfortunately
these applications placed a heavy burden on the systems they were analyzing. The
concept of using an Extract, Transform and Load (ETL) tool to copy
vital data for analysis from multiple systems to a central repository
was the solution to the problem. This is a data warehouse - a
repository of data for the sole purpose of analysis. The combination
of the two is data mining and warehousing.
How Data Mining and Warehousing Can Help You
As a small or mid-sized business the simple discussion of data mining
and warehousing will typically be encountered by shrugs. It's
commonly known that creating the necessary repositories to enable data
mining and warehousing is a costly and complicated process. Coupled
with the fact that data mining applications are notoriously difficult
to use and it makes for a recipe for disaster for the mid-sized business. This,
however, does not need to be true. New tools have become available
that make the process of data mining and warehousing significantly
easier to achieve and even easier to take advantage of. Through
tools like EMANIO's Unite! and Insight! applications a mid-sized business
can create data mining and warehousing projects for a fraction of the
cost typically associated with such projects. Coupled with the
amazing ease of use of Insight! data mining application, the two make
the promise of data mining and warehousing come true for the mid-sized
business.
Preparing for Data Mining and Warehousing
There is one aspect of preparing for data mining and warehousing that
even the mid-sized business needs to consider. This is the cleanliness
of your data. Dirty data in the form of missing fields, fields
that have improper elements in them and data that is simply corrupt
are the single biggest obstacle to a successful data mining and warehousing
project.
Getting the Most out of Data Mining and Warehousing
As you begin to use your data mining and warehousing infrastructure
it's important to continuously re-evaluate whether the data being stored
and analyzed by data mining and warehousing is the right data. As
businesses change and evolve it's important to evolve the use of data
mining and warehousing with them. The process of creating and
deploying data mining and warehousing is circular in nature and should
always be realigned with the needs of your business on a consistent
basis.
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