Just as a carpenter uses many tools to build a sturdy house, a good analyst employs more than one technique to transform data into information. Click here to learn more about data mining techniques. Other people's definitions of data mining are entangled with their definitions of data warehousing. Data warehouses and data mining are complements. Data warehouses are for storing data, not turning it into information.
Data mining turns data into information.
It's no surprise that organizations that built data warehouses without adding data mining software are disappointed in the return they've received on their data warehouse investment. They say data mining is just old fashioned data analysis - that data mining is a faddish name for a set of activities some people have been doing for many years. There's some truth in what these people say. But, their argument misses the point. Today is not like yesterday.