The basic definition of data warehouse at www.cait.wustl.edu/papers/prism/vol1_no1/home.html introduces the concept and provides a concise explanation of why it is important to organizations. According to the article "Data Warehousing Fundamentals" at www.broughton-sys.com/Bsihtml/Data_ware.html, data warehousing isn't just a way of storing historical data about an enterprise--it is a unifying and coherent method for organizing information systems. In "The Wiser, Gentler Data Warehouse" at www.sunworld.com/swol-05-1997/
swol-05-datawarehouse.html, SunWorld presents a step-by-step guide to developing a successful data warehouse. The Data Warehouse Research Center site, www.cio.com/CIO/rc_dw.html, provides general resources on data warehousing that range from articles, case studies, a glossary, and white papers to a list of vendors that sell data warehousing applications.

Once you have an organization's data stored and accessible in a data warehouse, how do you extract information from it? The answer is data mining. You'll find information about data mining by digging into the article "Digging into Data Mining," located at www.dbmsmag.com/9710d05.html. The article "Data Mining Today" at www.dbmsmag.com/9702d16.html reviews the most current data mining technologies, and you can find information about vendors of data mining tools at the Data Warehousing Information Center site, pwp.starnetinc.com/larryg/index.html. Two organizations, the Data Mining Group (www.dmg.org) and the Data Mining Institute (www.datamining.org), promote a broader understanding of data mining and work to establish standards for its use.