Term | Definition |
Attributes | Pieces of information describing a particular entity |
Data administration | A special organizational function for managing the organizations data resources, concerned with information policy, data planning, maintenance of data dicitonaries, and data quality standards. |
Data cleansing | Activities for detecting and correcting data in a database or file that are incorrect, incomplete, improperly formatted, or redundant. also known as data scrubbing. |
Data definition | Specifies the structure of the content of a database |
Data dictionary | An automated or manual tool for storing and organizing information about the data maintained in a database |
Data manipulation language | A language assoiciated with a database management system that end users and programmers use to manipulate data in the database |
Data mart | A small data warehouse containing only a portion of the organizations data for a specified function or population of users. |
Data mining | Analysis of large pools of data to find patterns and rules that can be used to guide decision making and predict future behavior |
Data quality audit | A servey and/or sample of files to determine accuracy and completeness of data in an information system. |
Data warehouse | A database, with reporting and query tools, that stores current and historical data extracted from various operational systems and consolidated for management reporting and analysis. |
Database | a group of related files. Also a collection of related files containing records on people, places, or things. |
Database administration | Refers to the more technical and operational aspects of managing data, including physical database design and maintenance. |
Database management system (DBMS) | Special software to create and maintain a database and enable individual business applications to extract the data they need without having to create seperate files or data definitions in their computer programs |
Database server | A computer in a client/server environment that is responsible for runnign a DBMS to process SQL statements and perform database management tasks. |
Entity | A person, place, thing, or event about which information must be kept. |
Entity-relationship diagram | A methodology for documenting databases illustrating the relationship between various entities in the database. |
Field | A grouping of characters into a word, a group of words, or a complete number, such as a person's name or age. |
Foreign key | Field in a database table that enables users to find related information in another database table. |
Information policy | Formal rules governing the maintenance, distribution, and use of information in an organization. |
Key field | A field in a record that uniquely identifies instances of that record so that it can be retrieved, updated, or sorted. |
Normalization | The process of creating small stable data structures from complex groups of data when designing a relational database. |
Object-oriented DBMS | An approach to data managment that stores both data and the procedures acting on the data as objects that can be automatically retrieved and shared; the objects can contain multimedia. |
Object-relational DBMS | A database management system that combines the capabilities of a relational DBMS for storing traditional information and the capabilities of an object-oriented DBMS for storing graphics and multimedia |
Online analytical processing (OLAP) | Capability for manipulating and analyzing large volumes of data from multiple perspectives. |
Predictive analytics | use of data mining techniques, historical data, and assumptions about future conditions to predict outcomes of events, such as the probability a customer will respond to an offer or purchase a specific product. |
Primary key | Unique identifier for all the information in any row of a database table. |
Records | group of related fields. Rows are commonly referred to as records. |
Referential integrity | Rules to ensure that relationships between coupled database tables remain consistent. |
Relational database | A type of logical database model that treats data as if they were stored in two-dimensional tables. It can relate data stored in one table to data in another as long as the two tables share a common data element. |
Structured Query Language (SQL) | The standard data manipulation language for relational database managment systems. |
Text mining | Discovery of patterns and relationships from large sets of unstructured data. |
Tuples | Rows or records in a relational database. |
Web mining | Discovery and analysis of useful patterns and information from the World Wide Web or (WWW) |