You go online to buy a digital camera. Soon, you realize you've bought a more expensive camera than intended, along with extra batteries, charger, and graphics software-all at the prompting of the retailer.

Happy with your purchases? The retailer certainly is, and if you are too, you both can be said to be the beneficiaries of "customer intimacy" achieved through the transformation of data collected during this visit or stored from previous visits into real business intelligence that can be exercised in real time.

Data Warehousing and Business Intelligence for...