Data Mining, Essay Example

Data mining is a method that has been used for a long time now to analyze data from different perspectives in order to summarize it into useful information. Many businesses have used this method to acquire useful information that they can use in there revenue increase techniques as well as cut costs to some of their operations. While data mining is recognized as one of the best techniques to acquire information from a huge information warehouse, two models have been created for this method. These are the Inmon Corporate information Factory and Kimball dimension modeling.

The two are different in such a way that, Corporate Information Factory by Inmon is a logical architecture whose purpose is to deliver business intelligence and business management capabilities driven by data provided from business operations (Imhoff, 1999). on the other hand, dimension modeling by Kimball is a name given to a set of techniques and concepts that are used in data warehousing. This model is considered different from other models which include the entry –relationship modeling.

The difference between the two is that while CIF consist of intelligence and management capabilities, Dimension model is just a set of techniques. In addition to that, Inmon recognizes his design to be situated to the fact that, it consist of all the databases and information systems in an organization. His design defines the overall database environment by including departments, individuals as well as recognizing the atomicity of the data as it is being stored in the warehouse.

The Inmon model consists of the architecture of the warehouse together with all the creations that are required in order for the organization to store the data. On the other hand Kimball model is as simple as table designing just like in any database designing. What Kimball defines in his approach is the facts and dimensions in which facts are used to contain matrices while dimensions are used to contain attribute (Ian Abramson, 2002).

Whereas CIF is found to put in place such factors as normalizations, these facts are not put in place by Kimball. This is one thing that has made many people to actually consider CIF rather than Kimball’s dimension modeling.

References

Abramson, I. (2002). Data warehouse: The Choice of Inmon Versus Kimball. Boston: IAS Inc.

Imhoff, C. (1999). The Corporate Information Factory. Washington: Inforomation Management Magazine.