The power of these machines cannot be approached by any other hardware on the market today. Unfortunately, this hardware requires a large investment in specialized software and support expertise. By far the widest range of unique products can be found in the area of user access, sometimes referred to as data mining. These products and features work and think for the user. They make it possible for a business person to ask the system to check on things, automatically send reports and monitor the status of various business functions.
Users fill out the appropriate screens, and intelligent software agents go out and do the work.
Query Facilities and Managed Query Environments. Unlike the overly simplistic or unintuitive report writers of old, these tools turn a large, complex data warehouse environment into a friendly, well-managed workstation. A lot of attention has been given recently to a large group of products formerly classified as decision support, artificial intelligence and expert systems but now categorized as data discovery products. A recent search on the Internet revealed no fewer then 57 different data discovery products for business analysis. These systems, sometimes referred to as spreadsheets on steroids, enable people to look at information from dozens of different perspectives.