Scathing review of Oracle’s pre-Siebel BI products
Stephen Few offers a blistering review of Oracle Discoverer, its portal integration, and its UI in general. This fits well with what I said last November:
Obviously, Oracle has the potential to be a titan in analytics. But it doesn’t have its act at all together yet.
And so I agree with a couple of comments on Stephen’s post, to the effect of “Well, gee, no wonder that Siebel’s BI tools look like they’ll be the surviving technology.”
EDIT: Mark Rittman offers a lot of screenshots of Oracle’s Siebel BI Suite. If you look at other posts on his blog, you’ll see Discoverer as well.
| Categories: Analytic technologies, Business intelligence, DBMS vendors and technologies, Oracle | 2 Comments |
My blogs stopped working through IE!
EDIT: Now they seem to be working again, with no action on my part and no known software updates through the whole process. Go figure. I do not know WordPress well enough to guess just exactly what had to have been broken and then fixed at my hosting provider to have caused these effects.
As of this writing, my blogs (DBMS2, the Monash Report, Text Technologies, and Software Memories) are all working in Firefox, and the top page of each is working in IE, but the rest of the pages/links are NOT working in IE. (But www.monash.com, a non-Wordpress site on the same host, is still working through IE.) Naturallly, I’m addressing this problem as fast as I can. I imagine the fix will involve some sort of a reinstall and/or theme change, which could alter the blogs’ look-and-feel, maybe not for the better (especially at first). I apologize for the inconvenience!
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My actual column on data mining
In a couple of recent posts about data mining, I referenced a Computerworld column due to run September 11. Wonder of wonders, they got it posted on the very first day. Here’s a link.
| Categories: Analytic technologies, Data mining | 4 Comments |
Where does data mining succeed, and why?
As previously noted, I have a Computerworld column coming out next week on data mining. The heart of the column is an enumeration of markets where data mining applications were having genuine success. Before I sat down to actually write the column, my list went something like this:
- There’s a large set of “early warning” apps where text mining is being deployed. Many of those same apps are addressed by data mining of tabular data too – antifraud, to start with, and also warranty tracking and indeed most of the rest.
- Data mining has been huge in CRM.
- The use of data mining in manufacturing to do failure analysis, improve quality, etc. is really on the rise. This goes at least somewhat beyond what one could reasonably pigeonhole as “early warning.”
- Data mining plays a big role in the life sciences, and is being applied to a broad range of other sciences as well.
- Data mining is a huge part of R&D at search engine and antispam vendors.
| Categories: Analytic technologies, Data mining | 8 Comments |
Further information on data mining
My September Computerworld column (I’ll post a link, no sooner than September 11) is about data mining. As promised in that column, here are some links and guides to further work on the subject.
- I have posted extensively on text mining over on the Text Technologies blog.
- In particular, much of the column was based on a post in which I discussed “early warning” applications of text mining.
- The research was informed by a trip to the KDD 2006 conference, about which I’ve blogged separately.
- SAS is world’s biggest vendor of this stuff, so if you want to know what the applications are, you might want to start with their website.
| Categories: Analytic technologies, Data mining | 3 Comments |
KDD 2006 conference on data mining and knowledge discovery
I went to the KDD 2006 (Knowledge Discovery in Databases) conference in Philadelphia last week. It was an interesting, if weird experience. The conference had been billed to me as the place where all the world’s great data mining/KDD experts gather. This turns out to have been old news; the conference has apparently fallen off some the past 2-3 years. What are left are an academic conference and a small trade show that seem to be only loosely coupled. Here’s what I experienced at each.
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| Categories: Analytic technologies, Data mining | 2 Comments |