In his blog, JT on EDM, James Taylor shares his analysis of Oracle Data Mining, including its new GUI and Exadata integration. While Oracle Data Mining has been available for a while, it is now easier to access and try via the Amazon Cloud. Using the Oracle 11gR2 Data Mining Amazon Machine Image (AMI), you can launch an Oracle Data Mining-enabled instance directly through Amazon Web Services (AWS) and connect to it using the Oracle Data Miner graphical user interface.

The new Oracle Data Mining GUI, which will be available to beta customers soon, provides more graphics, the ability to define, save and share analytical "work flows" to solve business problems, and provides more automation and simplicity. Taylor comments that, "the UI looks to have a nice look and feel including graphical model development flows, easy access to the data, nice little micro graphs when browsing data records and more."

On using Oracle Data Mining with Exadata, Taylor writes, "Oracle says that the use of the ODM routines in the Exadata kernel is faster than running a native ODM model in the database by a factor of 2 and that this increases as more joins are used. This could mean that ODM outperforms even third party in-database analytics."
Taylor concludes his blog with a positive overall review, stating that "ODM is a nice product for Oracle database customers and well worth looking into. The new UI will only make it more so."

Read the blog.