Digging for gold [data management]

The computer age promised to deliver information at the push of a button wherever it was needed. Instead it produces mounds of data, mostly worthless for any given purpose, requiring complex queries to extract relevant information. In the past, businesses failed to solve problems through lack of available data; nowadays the problem is more often too much data. The challenge is to find ways of distilling large volumes of data into valuable information. Most companies put far more information into their computers than they are ever likely to take out of them. Here, the authors describe how data mining offers a quick and efficient way of extracting those items that are useful