IBM Cognos Business intelligence delivers complete capabilities including reports, scorecards and analysis in one product allows users to author, share and use reports that draw on data across all enterprise sources for better business decisions.
Read more about Cognos here: http://www-01.ibm.com/software/data/cognos/
Alternative software for IBM Cognos Business Intelligence software is Pentaho Free Business Intelligence Software
Pentaho Open BI Suite is a business intelligence platform which does all the functions of a typical BI software such as data mining, Extraction-Transformation-Loading (ETL), analyzing the data and projecting the results in customized report formats and dash boards. The entire functions are loaded on top of a workflow engine thus providing a comprehensive business intelligence product.
Pentaho has excellent data management functions which allows you to drag and drop complex data and form reports in various formats such as PDF, excel and plain text to name a few. The dash board allows you to have a quick view of the processed data at any point of time. You can either use the entire product or select only those modules which are of interest to you.
The Pentaho BI suite is an open source product and hence it can be downloaded and used free of any payment. Further there is complete transparency on the software and you can view the source code for a better understanding. There is also a network of people who are always too eager to support you on any queries or clarifications you have on the product.
Pentaho product can easily be integrated into any IT infrastructure. Its web based interface is extremely good and provides a very convenient way of searching and providing reports on a large volume of data.
Download Here: http://www.pentaho.com/download/
Ref: http://www.techbuzz.in/free-business-intelligence-data-integration-etl-data-mining-tool.php
The term data mining has been used to mean anything from ad hoc queries, rules-based notifications, or pivot-chart analysis.
Data mining is the process of analyzing data to find hidden patterns using automatic methodologies. This type of data mining is often referred to using other terms such as machine learning, knowledge discovery in databases (KDD), or predictive analytics.
By far, the trendiest term today is predictive analytics,which many companies ironically are using to differentiate what they do from ‘‘data mining.’’ The inherent implication is that data mining is limited to the discovery of patterns, whereas predictive analytics allows the application of the patterns to new data to impute (or predict) unknown values. The motivation behind using the term predictive analytics is precisely this dilution of the meaning of data mining as it has been used in recent years. Predictive analytics, however, is an incomplete term because it ignores the descriptive nature of data mining. Therefore, until a marketing genius comes up with a clever, meaningless name like ‘‘Sparky,’’ the term we use will remain data mining.
Data Mining with Microsoft SQL Server 2008
Jamie MacLennan
