Because unsifted data represents a huge untapped investment, vendors of systems and software are rapidly moving to provide tools and methods enterprises need in order to turn their mountains of data into valuable information and knowledge. One of those methods is data mining. The data explosion began with the advent of distributed systems capable of capturing a variety of useful business information. Today, enterprises have adopted the technique of data warehousing to organize and secure data so it is available to those who require ready access to it. Properly implemented, data warehouses allow businesses to cope with narrowing market windows, shortened product cycles, demands for greater profitability, and the need to differentiate customer service.
Most data warehouses are hundreds of gigabytes in size, with many nearing a terabyte.
Some prognosticators foresee a day when terabyte data warehouses will be  the norm, with capacities of hundreds of  terabytes not uncommon. With the explosion of corporate databases and the stockpiling of more and more kinds of business data, corporations worldwide are turning to parallel processing technologies such as those available from Sun. Several technologies are available for extracting information from data warehouses. Many analysts begin by making educated guesses about relationships in the  data and creating simple database queries to confirm or deny their suspicions. One assumption common to all these approaches is that the individuals sifting through the data know what they are looking for.