Having been very impressed by what Microsoft has to offer I wanted to learn more about what Oracle has to offer, and I am equally impressed. I, like many others I suspect, tend to rather overlook that Oracle does data mining; because Oracle has so much on offer, some elements do tend to get neglected. In my case, having been a Tru64 user for many years, Oracle was not an option because they did not support the platform. But now that the mining is integral to the kernel of the database it is universally available, but old habits die hard and it has rather been off my radar.

An aspect of the tool that I have to comment on is its pricing. I hear a lot from Oracle users about how expensive everything is getting, it therefore comes as a very pleasant surprise to find that the Oracle data mining option is one of the great bargains available today because it is affordable and when you look at what you are getting it is a real Rolls Royce of capability and features.

That Oracle data mining should be as sophisticated as it is should not really be a surprise, because when Oracle went out to acquire data mining capability they went after one of the top offerings. The origins of the expertise comes from Thinking Machines whose Darwin product was one of the best that I had seen; but at the time I examined it for a leading Telco it was deemed by my managers to be too expensive so we went for Clementine, but I have always held in high esteem the experts behind Darwin. Having been acquired by Oracle, those experts obviously not only had the huge customer base to go after, but also the highly competent base technology of the Oracle database itself. So they redesigned from scratch and put the algorithms into the database to ensure that, not only is the execution of the algorithms efficient, but the vast amounts of data handling that typifies traditional data mining is minimised. This cannot be emphasised enough because data mining analysts traditionally only spend a tiny proportion of their time actually modelling; something like 80% of effort is expended on getting data to the tool to be used. So Oracle are leaving the database in situ and mining it there, which saves a lot of effort and will greatly increase productivity.

Whilst Microsoft may have impressed me by bringing data mining to the masses, Oracle is pitching at a different segment. This is a fully featured, highly sophisticated data mining capability to enable professionals to operate against Oracle data sets with productivity and precision. Oracle data mining has a broad range of available algorithms, which enable it to undertake virtually every kind of business and scientific analysis that one can think of. So whether you want to run supervised learning to classify data and make predictions, or you want to run unsupervised sessions to discover anomalies and clusters, Oracle has the right tool for the job.

When Oracle Data Mining in the database was first released I was again discouraged from using it because the algorithms were there but we had no commercially available means of easily accessing them. SPSS have been making their front end tools available to enable the benefits of the in-database offerings of Microsoft, IBM and Oracle to be readily exploited, and now Oracle are developing GUI based interfaces of their own, so again reasons not to examine this product are becoming increasingly hard to find.

One of the features that Microsoft are offering next year is the inclusion of data mining add-ins to Excel, but Oracle users need not feel obliged to migrate to Microsoft in order to gain such useful capabilities because Oracle themselves offer Excel users a one click access to mine data whether it is held in Oracle or Excel.

Oracle is where an awful lot of data exists today, and of the general purpose databases (so I am excluding the likes of Alterian from this) in my experience it is by far the most performant. With the acquisition of Seibel and their BI suite Oracle created a formidable BI offering, and now that I realise what a hidden gem their data mining suite is, it really is a very hard act for others to compete with. Whilst Microsoft is about bringing data mining to the masses Oracle are giving the data mining professional a real alternative to SAS and SPSS with an offering that is equally as well featured, but which promises to outperform any standalone offering.