The intrepid data miner runs many risks, including being buried under mountains of data or disappearing along with the "mysterious disappearing terabyte." Myths and misconceptions create their own risks and need to be debunked. This article outlines some risks, debunks some myths, and attempts to provide some protective "hard hats" for data miners.

It's critical to understand that data mining is a business process - a way of finding patterns in your data that provide insight you can use to conduct your business more effectively. Data mining also makes predictions to guide customer interactions and other business decisions.