Everyone has heard the phrase “information (or knowledge) is power,” and
the more skillfully people use information in the course of their jobs, the
greater their chances for success.
The process of gathering data from many different sources (if you can
even get the data at all) has traditionally been tedious, particularly before
computers became commonplace — and it has remained that way during
the information age. Some novels and movies would have you believe that
after you press just a few keys, you can automatically access vast amounts
of data from anywhere in the world, regardless of the platform you’re using,
the structure of the data (how it’s organized), or how the data is encoded
or keyed.
The real world isn’t quite that orderly, and anyone who has struggled to
perform what should be simple tasks (merging Pacific Rim sales data from
one system with North American sales data from another, for example) is
probably aware of the difficulties.
Suppose that Steve is a district sales manager at BlackAndWhiteVideos, Inc.,
MegaRetroMania’s upstart archrival. Unlike John and Mary, though, Steve has
no data warehouse from which to make requests, such as “Show me the top
20 BlackAndWhiteVideo stores across the district in which monthly total
comedy video rentals are at least double those of action videos so that I can
adjust the inventory accordingly.” Instead, Steve has to get the answer to
this question the old-fashioned way, as shown in Figure 2-1, by following
these steps:
1. He writes and distributes to all store managers in the district an e-mail
stating that he wants a report sent to him no later than the fifth day of
each month of rental dollars by category (such as comedy, action, and
romances), based on transaction records from each store’s point-of-sale
(POS) computer system.