Databases Reference
In-Depth Information
Figure 1-3
Address
Music
Favorite Food
Designers
DATABASE
Sales
Announcements
Restaurant
Suggestions
Recommended
CDs
Database and mining results.
are about to enter kindergarten, when they will graduate from high school, and
when they are engaged to be married. They then use the information generated
from the data stored in the database, along with sophisticated mining software, to
target sales efforts with a higher probability of success.
All this data is stored in databases. The databases are growing larger, not
only because more data is added to them on a daily basis, but because new kinds
of data are being captured and stored, based on the activities and transactions
in which you participate in the course of your daily living. The amount of data
being stored in databases every day, based on people's actions and transactions,
is already huge, but will get even larger in the coming years.
FOR EXAMPLE
Amazon.com
Amazon.com, the largest retailer on the Web, has perfected the technique of
using databases to characterize its customers. By analyzing the kinds of
products you have bought or expressed interest in, Amazon.com can pre-
sent you with displays of similar products that you are likely to find inter-
esting. This sales strategy requires not only massive, well-structured data-
bases, but also sophisticated data-mining software that finds associations and
relationships in customers' past behavior in order to prediction what cus-
tomers are likely to do and want in the future.
