ABSTRACT
Developments in information systems technologies have resulted in computerizing many applications in various business areas. Data are critical resources in many organizations; and therefore, efficiently accessing and sharing the data, extracting information from the data, and making use of the information have become urgent. As a result, many efforts on integrating the various data sources scattered across several sites and extracting information from these databases in the form of patterns and trends also have become important. These data sources may be databases managed by database management systems, or they could be data warehoused in a repository from multiple data sources.
