Data sources are everywhere. As the following picture tries to suggest, we can find data within all the realms of reality. This hyperbolic sentence is becoming more true thanks to the well-known trend of the internet of things, and now that every kind of object is getting connected to the internet, we are starting to collect data from tons of new physical sources. This data can come in a form already feasible for being collected and stored within our databases, or in a form that needs to be further modified to become usable for our analyses:
We can, therefore, see that between our data sources and the physical data warehouse where they are going to be stored, a small components lies, which is the set of tools and software needed to make data coming from sources storable.
We should note something here—we are not talking about data cleaning and data validation. Those activities will be performed later on by our data mining engine retrieving the data from our data warehouse. For...
