Database Reference
In-Depth Information
Transforming the Collected Information into Finished Products
Deciding upon and then collecting the information is only half the battle.
For the information to be truly useful, it must be presented in analytic
reports that provide the best judgments, conclusions, and projections
based on this information.
Transforming this data into useful information is a multistep process.
These steps require a team to study the material and then debate what the
material actually means and whether it is accurate and whether it har-
bors any inconsistencies. It is this first step where all facts will be verified,
experts consulted, and theses developed and tested.
Some approaches transform the collected information manually
through the efforts of intelligence officers. These people argue over the
facts and then make a decision as to the correct interpretation of the data
to be delivered to the CEO or other staff member. Today's BI technology
provides the ability to load all collected information into a knowledge base
and then perform automatic analysis and distribution. A good example of
this is the combination of the data warehouse and data mining.
Wal-Mart has the world's largest nongovernmental database as their
data warehouse. Their current data warehouse has hundreds of terabytes
of sales information. It is run on a massively parallel computer with
thousands of processors. This machine houses all of the details from
each cash register receipt for each sale at each of its many thousands of
stores, supercenters, and Sam's Club stores for the past 16 months. One
of Wal-Mart's tables has over two billion rows! Table scans are not a
viable option for responding to a query on this table because the table is
so massively large!
Wal-Mart uses its data warehouse for such things as its market bas-
ket analysis. Analyzing what is in each individual shopping cart (sales
receipt), they were able to discover the correlation between cold medi-
cine and Kleenex tissues. People who bought cold medicine usually pur-
chased tissues. In their stores, the Kleenex tissues were with the paper
products, while their cold medicine was in the pharmacy department.
When they stocked the tissues next to the cold medicine as well as in the
paper products area, the sales of tissues increased dramatically. Perhaps
cold sufferers did not know if they had tissues at home. Seeing the tissues
enticed them to go ahead and purchase them just in case they didn't have
any at home.
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