Abstract: The computerization of our society has substantially enhanced our capabilities for both generating and collecting data from diverse sources. A tremendous amount of data has flooded almost every aspect of our lives. There is a need in transforming the vast amount of data into useful information and knowledge. This has led to the generation of promising and flourishing frontier in computer science called data mining. Data mining is the automated or convenient extraction of patterns representing knowledge implicitly stored or captured in large databases, data warehouses, the web, other massive information repositories or data streams. Data mining can be applied to any kind of data as long as the data is meaningful for a target application. In this paper, we discuss in detail data warehouse and data warehouse data, which is almost basic form of data for data mining applications. We also present to you a typical framework of a data warehouse and data pre-processing techniques. We also discuss about OLAP (Online Analytical Processing) Data Marts which is a subset of an organizational data store, usually oriented to a specific purpose or major data subject, which may be distributed to support business needs.

Keywords: computerization, data mining, databases, data warehouses, data pre-processing techniques, OLAP (Online Analytical Processing) Data Marts.