Quick Hits: Oracle Data Mining

The following is quick  post on Oracle and its Data Mining capabilities. I hope you find this useful when deciding whether or not to use Oracle for this function.

Oracle Data MIning (ODM)  is an option that is part of Oracle’s Relational Database Management Systems Enterprise Edition. Oracle primarily specialized in developing and marketing database software and technology as well as cloud engineered systems and enterprise software products. In 2011 it was the second largest software maker by revenue behind Microsoft. They build other tools such as enterprise resource planning (ERP) software and customer relationship management (CRM) software as well as supply chain management (SCM) software.

ODM contains several algorithms for classification, prediction, regression, association, etc. Im terms of system requirements, ODM implements these data mining algorithms inside the Oracle relational database, which integrates these processes and operate natively on data stored in its tables. This helps eliminate the need to transfer data into other analytical and mining servers. Their relational database is managed to securely run queries and models. ODM also provides a native PL/SQL package to interpret and build models.

Detailed pricing information is not publicly available for this product. According to reviews, performance is good in terms of the approach that ODM takes. ODM uses R as a native interface for the database along with SQL. Being an R user, this certainly grabbed my attention. R code can be executed by any piece of SQL with no constraints on inputs or outputs or code packages being used. It helps support modelers on real time scoring and calculating scores/making predictions.