Nothing loosens up that pesky nugget like a well-placed stick of dynamite.
Similarly, there are ways in which you can significantly speed up and simplify your data-mining activities. Data warehouses support storage and access on specialized servers. Parallel-processing techniques accelerate data mining's complex queries. And, when you have terabytes of data to stash, storage considerations are important, especially as the price of disk space plummets. And there's also the matter of the 1000 percent return on investment that some data-mining pioneers are enjoying.