What is Oracle Data Mining?
Oracle Data Mining is an option to Oracle 10g Database Enterprise Edition (EE) that embeds data mining functionality for making classifications, predictions, and associations, as well as extracting new features from data, clustering data and ranking relative attribute importance. All model-building and scoring functions are accessible through either a Java interface or PL/SQL interface. A graphical interface, the Oracle Data Miner, supports "point and click" data mining with the benefit of generating Java code to expedite application development.
What is the value propostion for data mining, and Oracle Data Mining?
Data mining has been proven in numerous vertical markets to reduce costs and increase profits when applied to specific business problems such as response modeling, customer attrition, fraud detection, etc. By its nature, data mining provides accurate, actionable, and timely information upon which to base business decisions. 数据挖掘实验室
Oracle Data Mining enables users to get more value from their data warehouse investment by providing application development features such as a Java and PL/SQL interfaces, as well as the Oracle Data Miner graphical interface. This enables users to quickly see return on investment (ROI) in production applications. Oracle Data Mining plays a key role in an overall business intelligence solution involving Oracle technology, consulting, and training.
What is the target market?
Oracle Data Mining addresses the needs of the data analyst as well as the application developer. ODM can be applied to a wide range of datasets (in terms of number of records and columns) and customer problems. It is especially suited for companies that have large data, are committed to the Oracle platform, and want to automate and operationalize their extraction of business intelligence. The initial end user is the data analyst and Java or PL/SQL application developer, although the end user of the application enhanced by data mining could be a customer service rep, marketing manager, customer, business manager, or just about any other imaginable user.
The Oracle 10g Database is positioned as a computational engine, an analytical platform, not just a repository for static data. Oracle Data Mining fits into Oracle's strategy to derive additional value from your data and your investment in Oracle, as well as to simplify application development. Since data remains in the database, the process of data mining is simplified — all database features and product offerings are readily available.
Since the results of data mining are in the database, these results are available to any other user or application. Oracle Data Mining helps leverage your investment dollars by making the new business information available to everyone.
Why would a business benefit from using Oracle Data Mining?
Data mining can sift through massive amounts of data and find hidden information — valuable information that can help you better understand your customers and anticipate their behavior. Oracle Data Mining software helps you build applications to uncover this hidden information about your customers. Armed with this information, you can build a close relationship with and understand your customers, which helps you to: 数据挖掘研究院
- Better retain customers and avoid churn
- Profile customers and understand their behavior
- Maintain and improve profit margins
- Reduce customer acquisition costs
- Target profitable customers with the right offer
- Predicting the quality of a manufactured part
- Finding associations between patients, drugs, and outcomes
- Identifying possible network intrusions
What are Oracle Data Mining's competitive advantages?
Oracle Data Mining provides several distinctive competitive advantages:
- Data Mining Embedded in Oracle Database
- Ability to Enhance Applications with Predictions and Insights
- Programming Interfaces
- Well-integrated with other Oracle products
- Data Mining Embedded in Oracle 10g Database
By being embedded in the Oracle 10g Database, Oracle Data Mining facilitates extracting business intelligence from large volumes of data for production applications. It eliminates off-loading data to external special-purpose analytic servers for data mining and the subsequent scoring of even larger volumes of data. The data, data preparation, data mining, and scoring all exist within the database, which greatly simplifies the data mining process. In addition, overall application security is increased since data need never leave the secure database environment.Oracle Data Mining is available on all platforms supported by Oracle. This provides the widest range of platform support of any competitive data mining vendor.
Oracle Data Mining can scale to the size of the problem by adding hardware or switching to more powerful platforms. Oracle Data Mining takes advantage of Oracle's parallelism for faster computing by leveraging Oracle's Real Application Clusters (RAC) technology. 数据挖掘研究院
- Ability to Enhance Applications with Predictions and Insights
Oracle Data Mining enables companies to systemize the extraction and integration of new business intelligence within their operations. Application developers can use Oracle Data Mining's Java-based interface to add data mining insights and predictions to enhance business applications, such as Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Enterprise Resource Management (ERP), Web portals, and wireless applications. If customers wish to migrate their data mining application to another platform, their investment is preserved.Rather than having special departments of advanced data analysts who work on ad hoc data mining projects, the true value of data mining is realized when the new insights and predictions are integrated and "operationalized" into existing business applications.
Telecommunications companies, for example, can use Oracle Data Mining to build churn applications that identify customers that are likely to churn before they leave for a competitor. Oracle Data Mining's predictions can be used to anticipate customer behavior and proactively manage them in mutually beneficial 1:1 relationships.
- Programming Interfaces
Application developers access Oracle Data Mining's functionality through a Java-based or PL/SQL interface. Programmatic control of all data mining functions enables automation of data preparation, model-building, and model-scoring operations in production applications.
Java Interface
Java enables the development of platform independent applications and draws on SUN's Java Community Process (JCP) for evolving and extending the language. Java-based applications can leverage the J2EE and J2SE platforms supported by a wide variety of vendors. Java is supported in the Oracle database which enables Java applications to run inside or outside the database. With the Oracle Application Server, developers can build web-based, distributed applications leveraging the J2EE platform within the Oracle product suite. 数据挖掘研究院
The Java API allows application programmers to control all aspects of the data mining process, from data preparation and model building to model testing and data scoring. The interface can be used at two levels. For the data mining expert, the Java interface exposes algorithm-specific settings for advanced users. For data mining novices, default values are provided for nearly all settings to minimize the specification.
Programmatic control extends from data preparation and model building to on-demand scoring of single records and batch scoring of large data sets. Batch scores may be stored in relational tables for access by other business applications (e.g. call centers or marketing campaign systems) or called "on-demand" in interactive applications where new information is collected and provided to the predictive model, i.e. real-time scoring.
Oracle Data Mining's interface provides an early look at concepts and approaches being proposed for the Java Data Mining (JDM) standard. Ultimately, Oracle Data Mining will comply with the standard after it is published. JDM is an emerging data mining standard, following SUN's Java Community Process as a Java Specification Request (JSR). JDM has participation from Oracle, Sun, IBM, SAS, SPSS, and many other companies that recognize the need for a Java- based standard for specifying and using data mining. JDM leverages several other data mining standards, including Object Management Group's Common Warehouse Metadata (CWM), the Data Mining Group's Predictive Model Markup Language (PMML), and International Standards Organization's SQL/MM for Data Mining. 数据挖掘研究院
PL/SQL Interface
PL/SQL enables database developers to seamlessly integrate data mining functionality with their database applications. Oracle database developers and users are able to perform data mining operations using a familiar language and development methodology. Mining operations are presented as primitive capabilities, clearly separating transformations from model building and apply. PL/SQL introduces new capabilities not present in the Java API including native export/import of all supported models between ODM databases and advanced model evaluation using receiver operating characteristics (ROC). - Well-integrated with other Oracle Products
By virtue of being in the Oracle 10g database, data preparation can be performed in Oracle 10g Warehouse Builder and deployed as part of an overall data mining application. Users can take advantage of key analytical and statistical capabilties in the Oracle 10g database to analyze data and results.
Oracle 10g Data Mining is fully integrated with Oracle Universal Installer and RDBMS upgrade/downgrade process. This reduces the overhead associated with migrating applications between releases of non-Oracle data mining products.
Oracle10g Data Mining is integrated with Oracle 11i Applications Suite, such as Oracle Marketing.
What are some typical applications that could be enhanced by Oracle Data Mining?
Oracle Data Mining can automate the extraction and integration of new insight and predictions into a variety of business applications, including call centers, Web sites, campaign management systems, ATMs, enterprise resource management (ERM), and other operational and business planning applications.

