Database technology for decision support systems

Decision support systems form the core of business IT infrastructures becau se they let companies translate business information into tangible and lucr ative results. Collecting, maintaining, and analyzing large amounts of data , however, involves expensive technical challenges that require organizatio nal commitment. Many commercial tools are available for each of the three major data wareho using tasks: populating the data warehouse from independent operational dat abases, storing and managing the data, and analyzing the data to make intel ligent business decisions. Data cleaning relates to heterogeneous data integration, a problem studied for many years. More work must be done to develop domain-independent tools that solve the data cleaning problems associated with data warehouse develo pment. Most data mining research has focused on developing algorithms for building more accurate models or building models faster. However, data preparation and mining model deployment present several engaging problems that relate s pecifically to achieving better synergy between database systems and data m ining technology.