Various Data Mining Tools

Examples of data mining tools are SPSS (PASW Modeler, formerly known as Clementine), SAS (Enterprise Miner), StstSoft (Statistica Data Miner), Salford (CART, MARS, TreeNet, RandomForest), Angoss (KnowledgesSTUDIO, KnowledgeSeeker), and Megaputer (PolyAnalyst).

BI tools such as IBM Cognos, Oracle Hyperion, SAP Business Objects, Microstrategy, Teradata, and Microsoft only focused on multi-dimensional modeling and data visualization and not intended to be competitor of data mining tools.

Examples of free (open source) data mining tools are Weka and RapidMiner. The free data mining tools basically have no different with the commercial but in mining data in large dataset, the free data mining tools probably use lot of time and even crash due the use of computer memory that not efficient.

Microsoft's SQL Server is BI application that usually people use in studying data mining because data and models are stored in same relational database environment making the model management become very easy to handle.

Microsoft Enterprise Consortium provides a source for global access to Microsoft's SQL Server 2008 for academic purposes, teaching and research.The Consortium makes universities can access enterprise technology without maintaining the necessary hardware and software. The consortium also provides a variety of BI development tools  (ex data mining, cube building, business reporting) and a huge riil datasets from Sam's Club, Dillard's, and Tyson Foods.

Kdnuggets.com survey the community in May 2009 with following question: " what data mining tools that you use in the last 6 month for riil project ?". and from the survey, the data mining tools that most popular is SPSS PASW Modeler (formerly Clementine), RapidMiner, SAS Enterprise Miner, and Microsoft Excel.