One of the most important uses of the data warehouse is that of data mining. Data mining is the process of using raw data to infer important business relationships. Once the business relationships have been discovered, they can then be used for business advantage. Certainly a data warehouse has other uses than that of data mining. However, the fullest use of a data warehouse certainly must include data mining.
There are many approaches to data mining just as there are many approaches to actual mining of minerals. Minerals historically have been mined in many different ways — by panning for gold, digging mine shafts, strip mining, analyzing satellite photos taken from space, and so forth.
In much the same fashion, data mining occurs in many different forms and flavors, each with their own overhead, rewards and probability of success.