The On-Line Executive Journal for Data-Intensive Decision Support
*** November 25, 1997: Vol. 1, No. 8 ***
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IN THIS ISSUE:
DATA MINING BESIDE A WAREHOUSE BY KAMRAN PARSAYE
DATA WAREHOUSE -- PROTOTYPE OR PILOT? BY SID ADELMAN
LEGACY DATA CONVERSION FOR THE YEAR 2000 BY DOUG LANEY
ANALYSIS & COMMENTARY
DATA MINING BESIDE A WAREHOUSE
by Dr. Kamran Parsaye, Information Discovery, Inc
Kamran Parsaye, PhD, is CEO of Information Discovery, Inc. He is one of the original developers of the concept of "data mining", having developed commercial programs for this purpose in the mid 1980's. He originated the concept of an "intelligent database", and is the author of "Intelligent Database Tools & Applications" published by John Wiley. Dr. Parsaye has a wide range of experience in the software industry, both as a research scientist and as a high technology business leader, having provided guidance and direction to top level management of leading industrial and financial organizations, as well as key government entities such as the US AirForce. He received his BS and MS degrees in Mathematics from King's College, London, and his PhD in Computer Science from the University of California, Los Angeles. His books on databases are used in universities world wide.
Parsaye observes: "Data warehousing, OLAP and data mining have often been viewed as related activities. Yet, as I showed in New Realms of Analysis (Database Programming and Design, April 1996), they work on different computational spaces. Data access operations such as query and reporting deal with the data space, OLAP uses the multi-dimensional space and data mining takes place on the Influence Space. The four spaces which form the basis of decision support. They are the spaces for data, aggregation, influence and variation. A fifth space based on geographic relationships may also be used for some analyses."
DATA WAREHOUSE -- PROTOTYPE OR PILOT?
by Sid Adelman
Sid Adelman is President of Sid Adelman & Associates, a Sherman Oaks, California based consulting firm specializing in data warehouse and strategic data architecture. He co-authored a methodology and project planning tool tailored for data warehouses. Sid is an international speaker at data warehouse and industry conferences. He has written a number of articles on data warehouse and has chapters on data quality and organizational and cultural issues in Data Warehouse: A Practical Guide from the Experts.
Adelman writes: "In the late 1700s, Catherine the Great, Empress of Russia, wanted to see how her subjects lived. Her favorite minister (and lover), Prince Grigori Alexandrovich Potemkin wanted to keep her in the dark about the miserable state in which the Russian peasants actually lived. He put her off until he could build clean villages and populate them with Disneyesque peasants, sanitized and appropriately garbed in new, clean rustic costumes. The Empress was shown only these villages and was pleased to see how her subjects supposedly lived. These villages were given the name 'Potemkin Villages.' In this century we have the equivalent of Potemkin Villages in the prototypes created to show upper management the sanitized version of data warehouse."
LEGACY DATA CONVERSION FOR THE YEAR 2000
by Doug Laney, Consulting Manager, Prism Solutions
Doug Laney joined Prism Solutions following several years in the knowledge base systems field managing the development of complex decision support systems. Presently, he manages Prism's central region consulting group. He has headed the design of several data warehouse development projects and managed Prism's effort to produce Release 2.0 of its data warehouse development methodology, Iterations. Laney has also published several articles on data warehousing.
Laney notes: "Existing business systems throughout your organization may be saddled with the problem of storing and processing six-digit dates. Eliminating the two-digit century from consideration when building these systems was a common way to save disk storage and improve system performance. With the turn of the century approaching, systems that have eclipsed their intended life-span will have to undergo costly maintenance or migration. This is not optional. Many publications prophesize that the technical inability or prohibitive cost to solve this problem will bury some large corporations."
ACTION ITEMS
Survey Says IT Execs Spend Too Much Time on Operations, etc.
A recent survey conducted among members of Cambridge Information Network
(CIN), showed that 66% of senior IT executives would prefer to cut time
spent on operations, human resource concerns and daily business support.
Some 75% would like to devote more time to strategy and innovation.
Data Movement Solution Providers Claim Gigabytes-Per-Minute Performance
StatServer Provides Analysis Through Web
CONFERENCE CALENDAR
D S * INFORMATION
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