数据仓库,数据发掘和联机分析处理

The last few years have seen a growing recognition of information as a key business tool. Those who successfully gather, analyze, understand, and act upon information are among the winners in this new information age. There- fore, it is only reasonable to expect the rate of producing and consuming infor- mation to grow. We can define information as that which resolves uncertainty. We can further say that decisionmaking is the progressive resolution of uncer- tainty and is a key to a purposeful behavior by any mechanism (or organism). In general, the current business market dynamics make it abundantly clear that, for any company, information is the very key to survival. If we look at the evolution of the information processing technologies, we can see that while the first generation of client/server systems brought data to the desktop, not all of this data was easy to understand, unfortunately, and as such, it was not very useful to end users. As a result, a number of new tech- nologies have emerged that are focused on improving the information content of the data to empower the knowledge workers of today and tomorrow. Among these technologies are data warehousing, metadata repositories, online analyt- ical processing (OLAP), and data mining. In some ways, these technologies are the manifestation of the maturity of the client/server computing model and its applicability to a wide variety of business problems.
Therefore, this book is about the need, the value, and the technological means of acquiring and using information in the information age.