DBMS Data Warehouse Supplement, August 1996
It's happening again, and not for the last time either. When the concept of data warehousing took off, vendors of client/server query, analysis, and reporting tools promptly repositioned their products as data warehouse tools. In most cases, this made sense because these query tools accessed relational DBMSs, and most data warehouses use an RDBMS (even though the data model may be based on a star schema rather than an entity-relationship model). About two years ago, online analytical processing (OLAP) became prominent and many query tool vendors once again repositioned their products as OLAP tools. OLAP originally implied multidimensional analysis, but now any product that does a cross-tab or a drill-down will happily proclaim its OLAPness.
Data mining is the latest trend in the data warehouse market, and suddenly every OLAP tool now performs - or its vendor claims it performs - data mining, whatever that means. If anything that helps a user discover relationships in data performs data mining, then a CASE tool that reverse-engineers data models from the system catalog in a DBMS qualifies as a data mining tool. Logic Works, where are you? Next year, any graphics and charting program will instantly morph into a data visualization tool.
Nebulous terms such as data warehouse, OLAP, data mining, and data visualization lend themselves to a wide range of interpretations. Some vendors actually try to create new software programs or enhance existing products to support new techniques. Others will simply adopt the label and deliver new functionality later, if at all.
If you are shopping for software that performs a specific function or service, you will have to dig deeply to uncover products that are really relevant to your needs, as opposed to those that are merely wannabes. I hope that explanatory articles such as "Defining Data Mining" by Bruce Moxon will help you understand what features to look for and why.
I could say more, but my shiny new desktop Rolodex just arrived, complete with 50,000 new blank cards (it's a very large database). But wait! The box says it's a fancy new contact management DBMS sporting the latest value-based object access technology (the cards are sorted alphabetically). And it also has a hot new warmer for my coffee mug. I can't wait for the "Plus" version next year.
