Data Mining & Data Warehouse

No.1 Using Data Mining in Business Intelligence
The first article depicts the overall meaning of Data Mining. It portrays Data Mining as the
process of extracting hidden knowledge from large volumes of raw data. The article further
goes on to illustrate how Data Mining can be used in Business Intelligence. To read the full
article CLICK HERE
No.2 Data Warehouse
Data Warehousing, a wide variety of data that is designed to support a business
management decision making, has quickly evolved into a unique and popular business
application class. The article further goes on to demonstrate the various applications that
have evolved since the implementation of Data Warehouses. To read more on this article
CLICK HERE

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No.3 Open-Source Foes
Things get more interesting when we look at what's usually the most boring part of a software
package: the license agreements. Linux uses the popular GPL open-source license, which requires
that any code that's tightly linked with GPL-licensed code and then republished must also be GPL
code. That way, everything stays open-source.

For OpenSolaris, Sun worked up its own open-source license, the Common Development and
Distribution License. (Actually, the CDDL is modeled on the open-source license for the Firefox
and Mozilla Web browsers.) A key feature of the CDDL is that it lets CDDL-licensed code be
stitched together with non-CDDL code -- even proprietary code.
To read the full article CLICK HERE
No.4 Mining in Textual Mountains: an interview with Martin Hearst
Information retrieval is the process of finding information that is already known and has been inserted
into a document by an author. In an IR search of the Web, a person wants to find relevant documents
among all the other documents available online. Hearst describes information retrieval as a way to pull
out the documents you are interested in and push away the others.

In contrast, text data mining is a way to examine a collection of documents and discover information
not contained in any individual document in the collection. Hearst emphasizes this distinction because
it's what makes text data mining so exciting. With TDM, the researcher seeks new information that
wasn't previously known to anyone. Marti Hearst says, "Text data mining has the potential to be
something much more, and something somewhat different than information retrieval."
The article can be read in full if you CLICK HERE

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No.5 Sun Microsystems Outpaces NCR Teradata in Data Warehouse TCO Study
Sun Microsystems today announced that a study by Ventana Research found Sun outpaces NCR
Teradata in delivering the best total cost of ownership (TCO) for enterprise-class terabyte data
warehousing.The Sun BIDW platform offers a flexible and low-cost architecture and is deployed
at more than 2000 customers worldwide. Some of the world's largest business intelligence data
warehouse (BIDW) systems run on the Sun platform to achieve greater business agility and performance,
while reducing overall operational costs. Thousands of worldwide customers rely on the seamless,
scalable 64-bit Sun architecture to power their multi-terabyte class business intelligence (BI) networks.
Read more on the article CLICK HERE
No.6 Oracle(R) Database Leads Data Warehouse Pack According to Analyst Survey
Nasdaq today announced that Oracle(R) Database continues to be the leading database for production data
warehousing according to the TDWI- Forrester Quarterly Technology Survey. According to 44 percent of 290
respondents surveyed, Oracle Database was the database of choice for production data warehouses. According
to the report Oracle Database 10g provides a scalable and reliable engine for fast, complex query processing,
online analytical processing (OLAP) and data mining. Oracle eases the maintenance of ever-expanding data
warehouses with a single management interface complete with self-tuning and self-diagnosing features. With
Oracle Database 10g and Oracle Business Intelligence 10g, customers can reduce the cost and complexity of
building and deploying enterprise BI solutions. CLICK HERE to read the full article.

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No.1 Data Mining form the Pilot's seat
The data about a plane's speed, course, fuel and other details are available at a glance through the complex array
of guages, giving the pilot the information necessary to make sound, safe decisions. Similarly, organizations rely
on data to provide the foundation for business decisions. Many companies have discovered one inescapable truth:
it's impossible to make an informed decision based on outdated or erroneous information. Just as a pilot needs to
monitor the health of the aircraft, organizations need to constantly gauge the health of their data. However, companies
often believe that after cleaning data once, they have solved their data problems. But new data arriving at a data
warehouse can be outdated or inconsistent, compromising the "intelligence" of your business intelligence initiatives.
CLICK HERE to view the full article.
No.8 Compuware Vantage adds predictive analysis
Vantage is a tool for capturing performance metrics for client, network, server and database performance across
the business network to analyze the root causes of service interruptions. Compuware said that there is a gap between
the traditional functions of quality assurance (QA) and service management (SM). To deal with this problem Compuware
has created new features of Vantage that are specifically designed to span that gap, by creating a discipline of "service
assurance." The predictive analysis tool is a lightweight method for performance prediction from a lab or production
snapshot. Moreover It does not require extensive lab setup or special training. To read the full article CLICK HERE

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No.9 Hyperion Customers Gain Performance Visibility into Operational and Financial Data through Interactive Dashboards
With new innovations that improve visibility into financial and operational performance, dashboards are increasingly
becoming a "must have" for companies committed to high performance. Hyperion, a leading provider of business
performance management software, is at the front of this charge with new, interactive dashboards that are easy to use
and personalize, and that offer an unrivaled ability for even novice users to drill deep into source data to find the root
cause of a problem or variance.At the heart of the Hyperion Business Intelligence Platform offering is Hyperion
Performance Suite 8.3, a comprehensive and easy-to-use approach to dashboards and management reporting.
Read More CLICK HERE
No.10 Data Mining Firm Gave Your Information To Criminals
Criminals posing as legitimate businesses have accessed critical personal data stored
by ChoicePoint Inc.. The incident involves a wide swath of consumer data, including
names, addresses, Social Security numbers, credit reports and other information.
ChoicePoint aggregates and sells such personal information to government agencies and
private companies.

ChoicePoint is an Atlanta based company maintains a dossier on virtually every American
consumer. The company says it has 10 billion records on individuals and businesses, and
sells data to 40 percent of the nation's top 1,000 companies. This is very scary as the
only reason this was noticed is because a law enforcement agency was investigating an
identity theft crime. In that incident, suspects had posed as a ChoicePoint client to
gain access to the firm's rich consumer databases. To read more on this article CLICK HERE

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No.11 Microsoft's Bill Gates outlines his future vision for business applications
This article illustrates a speech made by the Chairman and Chief Software Architect Bill Gates outlining
his vision for the future of business applications with the use of data mining. "We're in a very exciting
period in terms of the advance in information technology. The Moore's Law exponential improvement
continues to really change the framework that all software is developed in. We see this in many areas."
from there Bill Gates further went on to speak about how technology is growing and his plans for technology
in the specifically in terms of software, network speeds, servers, and other business applications. also
in this article are short clips that help to illustrate Bill's point. Read More CLICK HERE
No.12 Amazon patents gift-guessing: Now has a monopoly on data mining techniques
Amazon.com has been awarded a rather strange patent: No. 6,865,546, entitled "Methods and systems of
assisting users in purchasing items." In broad terms the patent gives Amazon control over the data
mining techniques used when deciding what sorts of items a user may like to buy in the future.

An example of what this patent covers is using information gleaned from one purchase to provide
suggestions for a future purchase. For example, perfume bought a week before Valentine's Day can be
inferred to mean the item was bought as a Valentine's gift; it can also be inferred that the same
item is for a girl, which Amazon can then use to provide appropriate gift-wrapping colors and patterns
that wouldn't be offered for a man. More on this article can be read if you CLICK HERE


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No.13 Data Mining: Figuring Out Your Customers
If you are in the business of selling or marketing a product, the challenge is gathering and utilizing
information that will help you better understand your customers. This is why data mining is important in
this industry. It helps to achieve long-term sustainable relationships with customers. Data-mining helps
reveal customers' actual behavior patterns and characteristics. Data-mining reveals patterns in the data,
such as customers' transactional, behavioral and profile characteristics. These patterns are useful and
powerful because they serve as the basis of customer categorization (identifying customers with similar
characteristics). Read More HERE
No.14 Investigators argue for access to private data
The government is persistent on making the access to private data prohibitted, but what they dont realize
is that although this data can be used for the negative, it is also an essential source of information for
investigators. Presently investigators can trace people's whereabouts via the internet. If this access was
taken away then people such as Castillo and Ramos may be left to fend for themselves. Granted the availability
of such information can be fatal at times with the intrusion of privacy, yet at the same time the is a lot of
that can come from this information being readily available, for example, finding a long lost loveone. Read More....

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No.15 A Suitable Pair Of Genes
As a business segment, biotechnology has the potential of generating revenues of $5 billion and creating
one million skilled jobs over the next five years through products and services. Pharmacogenomics is a
rapidly growing segment that provides a wealth of information pertaining to defective or missing genes
which call for differentiated medicine, a new avenue for drug research. This emerging discipline combines
both infotech and biotech skills in augmenting high-speed data mining of both genotypic and phenotypic
information with a view to evolving new forms of medical diagnostics and therapies. Genomics and Proteomics
are churning out endless reams of data which need to be statistically evaluated and harnessed for commercial
end use. Read More........
No.16 As I See It: The Next Job Wave
There are always jobs available to people who don't care how they earn their money or what kind of world
they are laboring to fashion. So when George Carlin says it's about what you'll do for a dollar, and what
you'll do with a dollar, he means that we make economic choices and that those choices have consequences.
For IT professionals unconcerned with consequences, job opportunities abound in the great American surveillance
society.This emerging surveillance phase found its legs at the crossroads of technology and tragedy. Data
mining advances and the availability of cheap storage had, for some time, made it viable to capture and manipulate
vast amounts of decentralized data. The attack on the Twin Towers provided the excuse to centralize it and
unleashed an aggressive crusade to root out electronic secrets by knowing everything it was possible to know
about everyone. Read More........

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No.17 World's first Text Mining service to benefit British academics A new £1 million initiative to help academics with their struggle against data deluge was launched on 21
March at Manchester Town Hall. Search engines return thousands of documents, but the difficulty for the user
is to find those which are most personally relevant. Most of these searches have little concept of the meaning
of words that is gained from the context of a sentence. By using natural language processing, text mining can
discover this meaning and focus on specific needs of the user. Detailed abstracts can then be compared and
contrasted using data mining to discover patterns and associations that the human eye is more likely to miss.
The potential of text mining is virtually endless. In the future, databases could be populated with accurate,
valid, exhaustive, rapidly updated data where users find what they want all the time; where drug discovery costs
and development time are slashed and animal experimentation is reduced through early identification of unpromising paths
Read More of this article
No.18 Heller Bank installs Monarch data mining software
Datawatch Europe has successfully solved the problem of how to analyse debtors and creditor reports at Heller
Bank, Germany, saving the organisation time and money. Heller Bank is one of the top factoring banks - nationally
and internationally, with a reputation as one of the oldest and most successful factoring banks in Germany. The
nature of Heller's business generates a need to produce reports which enable them to analyse unpaid items against
debtors. Most organisations possess large amounts of archive data which holds the key to valuable knowledge. The
problem is, how do you obtain the relevant information without having to wade through reams of computer printouts;
spending hours re-keying data or asking an overworked IT department to commit valuable time and money in producing
special reports? The simple, cost effective answer is "with Monarch". Monarch is able to display reports on screen
with the same look and feel as hard copy print outs - users can zoom, scroll, page, jump and even turn on a greenbar
display. Read More of this article

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No.19 SPSS Boosts OLAP Performance with ShowCase Suite 7.0 SPSS in April will start shipping ShowCase Suite 7.0, a new version of its collection of business intelligence
software for the iSeries server. Based on an OS/400 port of the Essbase 7 multidimensional database that
SPSS partner Hyperion first delivered over a year ago, the new ShowCase release is expected to deliver
scalability and performance improvements, as well as new data viewing and analysis components to help
companies get more usable information out of their data. Running online analytical processing (OLAP) and
multidimensional database workloads on iSeries servers has gotten a bit of a bad rap lately. Many customers
and their IT vendors favor offloading processor-intensive work to less-expensive Intel-based servers running
Windows and SQL Server databases, and believe the iSeries is best used for transaction processing, not analytical,
workloads. Read More.....
No.20 IBM Integrates Alphablox Analytics Into Data Warehousing Product
The new DB2 Data Warehouse Edition 8.2.1 will incorporate Alphablox into its data mining; online analytical
processing (OLAP); and extract, transform and load (ETL) capabilities, IBM said Monday. IBM acquired Alphablox,
a Mountain View, Calif., Web analytics company, last summer for an undisclosed amount. Such moves put IBM
and Microsoft in a quandary relative to their ISV partners. Both software powers compete for ISVs, claiming to
be the best foundation partner for third-party development. But IBM and Microsoft also are moving up the
software stack by putting more functionality..... Read More.

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No.21 SPSBE Pair to Look at Cell Phone Usage and Auto Accidents Hang Nguyen and Wen-Shuan Tseng, master's degree candidates in SPSBE's Department of Information Technology,
are looking for an answer to a question everyone is wondering about these days: Is there a relationship between
cell phone usage and auto accidents? Recently selected as this year's GEICO Student Scholars in Discovery Informatics,
the two recipients will use data mining techniques to explore the relationship between the two activities.The
students will conduct their research at the university's Montgomery County Campus, supervised by Jay Liebowitz, a
professor, and William Agresti, an associate professor, both in the Department of Information Technology. Read More.
No.22 Apollo Data Unveils Predictive Analytics Solution
Apollo Data Technologies plans to launch a predictive analytics solution this week that puts complex statistical
tools in the hands of marketers. Predictive analytics mines transactional, behavioral, call center, and
geo-demographic data to identify consumer patterns, segments, and behavior. In marketing, the technology can
apply various algorithms to data to understand consumer buying behavior.Apollo has used predictive analytics for
such data mining and data warehousing tasks as enabling The Seattle Times to target marketing efforts to various
customer segments and helping Barnes & Noble maintain retail store inventory levels. It also applies the technology
to a text mining program. Read the entire article.

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No.23 Using Java Data Mining to Develop Advanced Analytics Applications With the standardization of the Java Data Mining (JDM) API, Enterprise Java applications have been given predictive
technologies. Data mining is a widely accepted technology used for extracting hidden patterns from data. The objective
of this article is to introduce Java developers to data mining and explain how the JDM standard can be used to integrate
this technology with enterprise applications. JDM provides an industry standard API to integrate data mining functionality
with applications. It facilitates the development of vendor-neutral data mining tools/solutions. It supports many commonly
used mining functions and algorithms. JDM uses the factory-method pattern to define Java interfaces that can be implemented
in a vendor-neutral fashion. Read more.....
No.24 GRT Puts Information to Work for Insurance Firms; Business Intelligence Solution Delivers Key Metrics for Strategic Decision-Making
GRT Corporation, an industry leader in Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing, today introduced GRT Insurance
Analyzer, a comprehensive Business Intelligence solution for the Property & Casualty, Life and Reinsurance markets.
The new offering, which utilizes insurance industry standards such as ACORD, ISO and NCCI, integrates and analyzes
a wide array of data from existing systems, including policy administration, claims processing and customer/agent
relationship management. The results can be visualized as reports, dashboards and scorecards that give insurance
companies visibility into profitability, performance and position. Read more.....

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No.25 Data Warehouse Boost on a Budget When Premier Inc.'s medical databases began bogging down last year, the San Diego-based provider of clinical data
put its data warehouse in a box literally. Chris Stewart, director of data warehouse architecture states the problem
wasn't just the size of the database, however, but how clients used the data. "Our users want to access all of the
data from top to bottom." Instead of adding to its 24-processor Solaris server infrastructure or making further attempts
to optimize the database, Stewart brought in an all-inclusive data warehouse appliance from Netezza Corp. in Framingham, Mass.
As data warehouses continue to grow, more users are demanding access to business intelligence (BI) tools to conduct data-mining
exercises across large data sets........... Read more.....
No.26 Data Warehousing: Our Great Debate Wraps Up
The Inmon data warehouse design model relies on a relational or 3NF design foundation with data stored at the atomic
level in the data warehouse, which is then aggregated and made accessible across the enterprise, by exploration warehouses,
data mining warehouses and OLAP data bases. Whereas the CIF architecture embraces the star schema design for the data marts
only, NOT for the design of the data warehouse. Inmon describes the Kimball approach as "brittle" because, in his opinion,
the star schema is closely aligned to end-user requirements. Therefore, it does not produce a reusable form of data for the
enterprise. Storing the atomic data in dimensional structures provides business users with the ability to get answers to
immediate and, sometimes unpredictable, problems. According to the Kimball approach, this puts usable data in the hands of
the business user making the query without requiring a data warehouse expert to drill into the different normalized structures
for the data. Read more.....

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No.27 The Future Of Scientific Supercomputing & Collaboration Technology Discussed In Oakland, California Science professionals gathered in Oakland, California, on Thursday, March 17, to learn about the future of supercomputing
and collaboration technology in biotechnology and bioinformatics. The ground-breaking forum featured speakers in bioinformatics
and drug discovery and addressed the full integration of methods and technologies that enhance all phases of research; the
integration of multiple facilities collecting data; robust computing power for supercomputing and resource collaboration
efficiencies; data mining, complex processing and much more. The International Data Corporation (IDC) estimates that the
grid computing portion of the high-performance computing market will grow exponentially in the next few years. The forecasted
market size can be attributed to a combination of factors including the maturation of grid software, the drive for efficient
use of IT infrastructure by end users.......... Read more.....
No.28 "Mining What Others Miss," Feature Article, February 2005
The method for an increasing number of scientists and engineers is data mining. Data mining draws upon
extensive work in areas such as statistics, machine learning, pattern recognition, databases, and high-
performance computing to discover interesting and previously unknown information in data. Data mining
technology has enabled earth scientists from NASA to discover changes in the global carbon cycle and
climate system........ The full text of the article can be found here.......

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