Drill down

For other uses, see data drilling.

In information technology, to drill down means to move from summary information to detailed data by focusing in on something. In a GUI-environment, "drilling-down" may involve clicking on some representation in order to reveal more detail.^[1]

To drill down through a series of folders, for example, on a desktop means to move through the hierarchy of folders (from the top downwards) to find a specific file or to click through drop-down menus in a GUI. Clicking on an item moves you to a level of greater detail. When an online user accesses more and more pages of the website, he or she may delve deeper into the content of the site. As a web-surfer goes further into a website, he or she goes deeper into the back pages and thus deeper into data. (Of course, he or she could also begin—for example via an external search engine—at a detailed view, and drill up to the front page of the site.)

Drilling down through a database involves accessing information by starting with a general category and moving through the hierarchy: from category to file/table to record to field. When one drills down, one performs de facto data analysis on a parent attribute. Drilling down provides a method of exploring multidimensional data by moving from one level of detail to the next. Drill-down levels depend on the data granularity.

The field of managerial economics uses the term "Drill Down" to explain exciting but technical aspects of operations research and regression analysis.^{[citation needed]}

For an alternative data-extraction metaphor, see data mining.

References

1. ^ "SAP for MIT Documentation on the Web". Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 2001. http://web.mit.edu/sapr3/docs/webdocs/glossary/glCD.html#D. Retrieved 2010-03-09. "Drill Down[:] Clicking on an item to move to a level of greater detail." 

External links

• Expedite-email-marketing.com
• 1keydata.com
• Iab.net^{[dead link]}
• Angelfire.com
• Ucsc.edu^{[dead link]}