Data Warehouses and Data Mining

This article gives a detailed summary of the role of data warehouses and data mining, and their relationship to organizational databases. As you read, pay attention to how data warehouses are used to improve decision-making in organizations. Keep a summary in your notes of how an organization you are involved with could benefit from data mining and data warehousing.

Types of Data Warehouses

There are three types of data warehouse applications:

  1. Information processing: The data can be accessing by means of querying, basic statistical analysis, reporting using crosstabs, tables, charts or graphs.
  2. Analytical processing: The data can be analyzed by means of basic OLAP operations, including slice and dice, drill down, drill up, and pivoting.
  3. Data mining: Data mining supports knowledge discovery by finding hidden patterns and associations, constructing analytical models, performing classification, and prediction.