Review of Oracle Magazine–November/December 1996

The headline articles for the November/December 1996 edition of Oracle Magazine were focused on VLDB with articles on scaling to petabyte sized databases, the latest and best hardware to use, what new exist features in 7.3 and 8 for VLDBS, what new tools exists to assist administrators with the scale of the database.

Other articles included:

• There was an article on what is a Operational Data Store (ODS) and it also highlights how and ODS is different to a Data Warehouse. Despite this article and many, many more like it in the wider press since 1996 there is still lots of confusion out in the IT world on what whey are and how they are different.
• A new Database Design tool has been added to the Oracle Designer/2000 suit. This new tool was supposed to be lightweight, etc.  Oracle Data Modeler is a much better tool.
• Oracle outlines their roadmap for making their database and certain tools available on Windows NT.
• IKEA has implemented and Oracle 7 DB on multiple platforms, including IBM MVS, Digital VMS, IBM AIX and other UNIX variants. Other tools used by IKEA included Developer/2000 and Designer/2000.
• How to manage multi-table joins to reduce the amount of processing. The article looked at how to use Nested Loops, Merger Joins and Hash Joins. The article also suggests that in some cases maybe you need to consider redesigning your tables/data model.
• Motorola implements multi-lingual Oracle Human Resources 10SC in 14 offices in 8 countries. There was a lot of use of NLS functionality in the database including NLS_LANG, NLS_NUMERIC_CHARACTERS, NLS_SORT and the translated _TL tables in Oracle Applications.
• We have the first Y2K related article, an much of the discussion focused on how Oracle Stores Dates in the database. Most of the fuss focused on if you captured and stored a two digit year or a four digit year. Oracle provided the RR format mask to minimise the amount of recoding that needed to be done to Many applications around the world.
• There was 6 pages of job adverts from Oracle Australia, Database Consultants Inc, ACT1, BPA, Profound Consulting, RHI Consulting, Ernst & Young, TransTech, Wilco, Information Alliance, Exor Technologies, The Consulting Team, InTimeSystems, May&Speh, Price Waterhouse. I wonder where some of those companies are now.

To view the cover page and the table of contents click on the image at the top of this post or click here.

My Oracle Magazine Collection can be found here. You will find links to my blog posts on previous editions and a PDF for the very first Oracle Magazine from June 1987.

Review of Oracle Magazine-September/October 1996

The headline articles for the September/October 1996 edition of Oracle Magazine was on Putting the Web to Work and focused how to build web based applications. Topics covered included the Web Server, Intranet vs Client/Server applications, what (Oracle) tools to use.

Oracle articles included:

• There was an interesting advertisement from Sun. It consisted on one page that contained the following text, “when your intranet is protected with Solstice by Sun, unauthorized users see your information quite differently,. For a free demonstration, turn the page” The next two pages are blank!
• Oracle publishing will be launching Oracle Applications Magazine in November 1996. The new magazine will be targeted at top line-of-business managers and will offer executives and other qualified Oracle Applications users in-depth industry analysis and technology and business overviews of topics critical to managers looking for technology solutions to business problems.
• Euro Star train service that covers UK and France, and has trains running under the the English Chanel, has implemented the Oracle Financials Application suite. One of the main features is its ability to handle multiple currencies and companies and the flexibility of running processes and period-end routines.
• Oracle announces that Wells Fargo has negotiated that the largest enterprise database licence agreement in the financial industry and will be implementing Oracle Universal Server, Oracle DB 7.3 as well as DB options such as data warehousing and electronic commerce. This new environment will need to support 25,00 users and the gathering of 80 gigabytes of data each month.
• Oracle has released a number of its applications for the web.
• Using partitioning for a Data Warehouse and how it compares to using Clustering.
• How to build business rules using triggers in Oracle 7 and how to ensure consistency in the data.
• A summary of a number of SQL Functions were given with examples. These included Numeric, Character, Data, Conversion and Group By functions.
• A listing of a procedure and some other scripts was given for sizing tables and indexes in Oracle 7.

To view the cover page and the table of contents click on the image at the top of this post or click here.

My Oracle Magazine Collection can be found here. You will find links to my blog posts on previous editions and a PDF for the very first Oracle Magazine from June 1987.

My OUG Ireland Conference Presentations

Wednesday 21st March an important for the OUG Ireland as it is the annual conference. This year we are in a new venue, the Dublin Convention Centre, on the river Liffey.

After many, many years of being an attendee of my local conference, this year I will be presenting 2 presentations. Actually, I’ll be presenting one and co-presenting another.

My first presentation, will be an introduction to Oracle Data Miner, which is now part of SQL Developer. I will be talking about the new features and some features that be part of a future presentation. Most of the presentation time will be taken up with a Demonstration of using Oracle Data Miner (ODMr). I will step through a the main steps of data mining using the ODMr tool. The data set that I will be using is based on a University in the UK who wanted to look at how data mining could be used to help them manage student retention/churn.

The second presentation will be lead by Antony Heljula, of Peak Indications, with me co-presenting or butting in on some topics. This presentation will be at a much higher level. This presentation will be aimed at analysts and managers who are looking at data mining and what it can do for them.We will look at what it can be used for, who are the main people, some sample case studies/application areas, data quality issues, etc. There will be a demonstration on how you can incorporate the data mining model, developed in the first presentation, into OBIEE Dashboards. We will be using the same UK University scenario here and we will show how data mining has helped to identify specific types students that could not be identified using other means.

Check out the full conference agenda – here

There are plenty of excellent presentations, with lots of Oracle ACE’s and Oracle ACE Directors.

Some of my other activities on the day will be:

• Talking to people about writing articles for the Oracle Scene, the user group manage. I’m the deputy editor of Oracle Scene.
• I’m also deputy chair of the Irish BI & EPM SIG, so I’ll be trying to persuade people take part in and present at future meetings.
• Finally and perhaps most importantly, I will be meeting other people in the Oracle world here in Ireland. Some of these people I know for 20+ years. Because of busy schedules sometimes the only time we get to catch-up is at the annual conference.

If you would like to talk to me about the topics covered in the presentations or about any of the about activities, look out for me during the day. I will be at the (free) drinks reception at the end of the day, so you can talk to me then. If that does not suit, then drop me an email and we can arrange to meet up.

Rewards received in the Post today

Today I arrived home from work to find that I had received 2 parcels.

In the first parcel was

Thank you Oracle ACE Programme and OTN.

In the second parcel was an IOUG Select Contributors T-shirt. I received this because I had an article in the Q1 2012 edition of IOUG Select, on Oracle Data Miner.  Thank you IOUG.

ODM 11gR2–Attribute Importance

I had a previous blog post on Data Exploration using Oracle Data Miner 11gR2. This blog post builds on the steps illustrated in that blog post.

After we have explored the data we can identity some attributes/features that have just one value or mainly one value, etc.  In most of these cases we know that these attributes will not contribute to the model build process.

In our example data set we have a small number of attributes. So it is easy to work through the data and get a good understanding of some of the underlying information that exists in the data. Some of these were pointed out in my previous blog post.

The reality is that our data sets can have a large number of attributes/features. So it will be very difficult or nearly impossible to work through all of these to get a good understanding of what is a good attribute to use, and keep in our data set, or what attribute does not contribute and should be removed from the data set.

Plus as our data evolves over time, the importance of the attributes will evolve with some becoming less important and some becoming more important.

The Attribute Importance node in Oracle Data Miner allows use to automate this work for us and can save us many hours or even days, in our work on this task.

The Attribute Importance node using the Minimum Description Length algorithm.

The following steps, builds on our work in my previous post, and shows how we can perform Attribute Importance on our data.

1. In the Component Palette, select Filter Columns from the Transforms list

2. Click on the workflow beside the data node.

3. Link the Data Node to the Filter Columns node. Righ-click on the data node, select Connect, move the mouse to the Filter Columns node and click. the link will be created

4. Now we can configure the Attribute Importance settings.Click on the Filter Columns node. In the Property Inspector, click on the Filters tab.

- Click on the Attribute Importance Checkbox

- Set the Target Attribute from the drop down list. In our data set this is Affinity Card

5. Right click the Filter Columns node and select Run from the menu

After everything has run, we get the little green box with the tick mark on the Filter Column node. To view the results we right clicking on the Filter Columns node and select View Data from the menu. We get the list of attributes listed in order of importance and their Importance measure.

We see that there are a number of attributes that have a zero value. It algorithm has worked out that these attributes would not be used in the model build step. If we look back to the previous blog post, some of the attributes we identified in it have also been listed here with a zero value.

Update on Exalytics Pricing

In my previous blog post (Exalytics : How much will it cost me ?) I gave an outline of the pricing you might expect for an Exalytics machine.

The final pricing that I gave of approx $3+M was based on the per processor licencing.

Yesterday (24th Jan) the Oracle Business Intelligence blog by Manan, included the pricing based on the per user licences.

The following is a breakdown of the Exalytics pricing based on the minimum 100 user licencing.

Licence Costs (100 users)

Exalytics machine = $135,000

TimesTen = $300 x 100 users = $30,000

BI Foundation Suite = $3,675 x 100 users = $367,500

Giving a grand total of $532,500.

Support Costs (100 users)

But we need to add the annual support costs to this.

Exalytics machine support = $29,700.

TimesTen support = $66 x 100 users = $6,600

BI Foundations suite = $809 x 100 users = $80,900

Total support costs (100 users) = $116,500

First year & on-going costs costs

Total first year cost for an Exalytics machine = $532,500 + $117,200 = $649,700

Plus on going annual support costs of $117,200 in year 2 and subsequent years.

Discounted Costs

If you are one of the lucky customer who can If I use the same discounts, as I did in my previous blog post, of 25% discount on hardware and 60% discount on the software, we get:

Year 1 cost of : ($135,000*0.75) + ($397,500*0.40) = $260,250

So it might be possible to get an Exalytics machine for $260+K, plus annual support costs.

Exalytics : How much will it cost me ?

Over the past couple of weeks the costing for the Oracle Exalytics machine has been made public by Oracle and there has been a number of articles. What I’ve done in this blog post is to collate this information. I give what I understand to be the cost of purchasing an Exalytic machine and to get setup and running.

The pricing structure starts at

Exalytics machine + cost of BI Foundation Suite + TimesTen licences

Exalytics machine = $135,000

TimesTen = $34,500 per processor licence or $300 per named user(min 100 users)

BI Foundation Suite = $450,000 per processor licence or $3,675 per named user (same number of users as for TimesTen = min 100 users)

Annual Support Costs

Exalytics machine = $29,700

TimesTen = 22% of software licence – $7,590 per processor licence or $66 per named user (min 100 users)

BI Foundation Suite = $99,000 per processor licence or $809 per named user(min 100 users)

The Exalytics machine consists of a single server with 1TB of RAM and 4 Intel Xeon E7-4800 processors, with 10 cores each.

 

So the total cost of an Exalytics machine based on the processor licence will be something towards the $10M. Now this is before the discounts that you can negotiate. There are reports of discounts ranging up to 25% on hardware and 60% on software. The size of the discount is depended on your size etc. So this initial $10M cost could be reduced to $3M+.

 

Please note that I may have gotten some or all of this pricing wrong. If I have then forgive me and let me know what is wrong. I can correct it to ensure that we have the correct costs.

New additions to my Oracle Magazine Collection

I put out a call a few months ago looking for help in completing my Oracle Magazine collection. I also had a letter in the Nov/Dec 2011 edition of Oracle Magazine looking for help.

The following people contacted me in December offering to send me some of my missing editions.

Lisa Dobson - Oracle DBA at Durham University and Vice President of UKOUG
Debra Lilley - President of UKOUG
Christian Antognini - Trivadis AG, Switzerland
Dan Vlamis - Vlamis Software Solutions, MO, USA

Many thanks for your donations.

It seems that people don’t keep their Oracle Magazines!

I’m now just missing a very small number of editions since 1992.  Can anyone else help ?

Does anyone have any Oracle Magazines from before 1992 ?

The following table gives the current collection (printed editions). The grey boxes are the editions that I’m still missing, and keep an eye on my Oracle Magazine page for updates.

i-BI : A new name for real BI

I’ve been working in the BI and related fields since the mid 90s. Over the past number of years I’ve gotten a little bit confused about what Business Intelligence (BI) really means.  Maybe it’s just a bit of old age kicking in way too early.

It seems to me that the term Business Intelligence has been hijacked by a large number of companies and software vendors. It seems that every “reporting tool” has been re-labelled into a Business Intelligence tool, without providing any really intelligence features. You are still just a reporting tool with no real intelligence features. Yes you do have some nice graphics that can be used instead of just listing numbers. But that is not Business Intelligence.

Business Intelligence is going beyond what these tools are capable off. Most of the skills and abilities for BI comes from the people who are doing it, not the tools. In reality you will need to use a number of tools or to write some custom code to help you gain the extra bit of insight into your data. The “reporting tools” can then deliver the results.

Also Ralph Kimball said a long time ago that the skills of someone working in the DW/BI area was that they needed to be half-DBA and half-MBA.

A quote that I heard recently from the Predictive Analytics World Conference, was “You need to be able to ask the right question”. This is to ensure that you can frame your analytics projects correctly and be able to measure the results.

I think that this question was key back in the mid 90s when I started out in the BI field and I still think it applies to all areas of BI.  The thing that we have lost in BI is the real intelligence part of it.

So I’m proposing a new name for really BI. It is intelligent-Business Intelligence (i-BI).

Lets differentiate between BI and the real intelligent BI work.

What do I mean by intelligent BI (i-BI) ?  What I mean area skills in Data Warehousing, Time Series Analysis, Advanced Analytics, Data Mining, Predictive Analysis, solving or addressing real business problems, etc.

Or maybe I’m just wrong and have missed some developments in BI over the past 16+ years. Or maybe I’m becoming a bit too cynical.

What do you think ?

Article for Oracle Scene–Due 13th Jan

As we approach Christmas, many of us will be looking forward to a few days holidays/vacation. During this period we may start thinking about some techniques or methods that we discovered over the past 12 months or about things we need to find out more on, over the coming months.

One thing to consider is to write an article on these techniques or methods, for Oracle Scene.  The next due date for submitting articles is 13th January.

http://www.ukoug.org/what-we-offer/oracle-scene/editorial-calendar/

For more details and ideas check out my webpage Oracle Scene

Make sure you check out the Article Guidelines and Submission Details

http://www.ukoug.org/what-we-offer/oracle-scene/article-submissions/

I hope to write an article based on the presentation I gave at the UKOUG Conference in Birmingham.

The most common question that I get asked is ‘how long should it be?’.  The length of an article can be anything from half a page, up to 4 or 5 pages long.

Updating your ODM (11g R2) model in production

In my previous blog posts on creating an ODM model, I gave the details of how you can do this using the ODM PL/SQL API.

But at some point you will have a fairly stable environment. What this means is that you will know what type of algorithm and its corresponding settings work best for for your data.

At this point you should be able to re-create your ODM model in the production database. The frequency of doing this update is dependent on number of new cases that you have. So you need to update your ODM model could be daily, weekly, monthly, etc.

To update your model you will need to:

- Creating a settings table for your model
- Create a new ODM model
- Rename your new ODM model to the production name

The following examples are based on the example data, model names, etc that I’ve used in my previous post.

Creating a Settings Table

The first step is to create a setting table for your algorithm. This will contain all the parameter settings needed to create the new model. You will have worked out these setting from your previous attempts at creating your models and you will know what parameters and their values work best.

-- Create the settings table
CREATE TABLE decision_tree_model_settings (
    setting_name VARCHAR2(30),
    setting_value VARCHAR2(30));

-- Populate the settings table
-- Specify DT. By default, Naive Bayes is used for classification.
-- Specify ADP. By default, ADP is not used.
BEGIN
    INSERT INTO decision_tree_model_settings (setting_name, setting_value)
    VALUES (dbms_data_mining.algo_name,       
           dbms_data_mining.algo_decision_tree);
   
    INSERT INTO decision_tree_model_settings (setting_name, setting_value)
    VALUES (dbms_data_mining.prep_auto,dbms_data_mining.prep_auto_on);
  
    COMMIT;
END;

Create a new ODM Model

We will need to use the DBMS_DATA_MINING.CREATE_MODEL procedure. In our example we will want to create a Decision Tree based on our sample data, which contains the previously generated cases and the new cases since the last model rebuild.

BEGIN
    DBMS_DATA_MINING.CREATE_MODEL(
        model_name          => ‘Decision_Tree_Method2',
        mining_function     => dbms_data_mining.classification,
        data_table_name     => 'mining_data_build_v',
        case_id_column_name => 'cust_id',
        target_column_name  => 'affinity_card',
        settings_table_name => ‘decision_tree_model_settings');
END;

Rename your ODM model to production name

The model we have create created above is not the name that is used in our production software. So we will need to rename it to our production name.

But we need to be careful about when we do this. If you drop a model or rename a model when it is being used then you can end up with indeterminate results.

What I suggest you do, is to pick a time of the day when your production software is not doing any data mining. You should drop the existing mode (or rename it) and the to rename the new model to the production model name.

DBMS_DATA_MINING.DROP_MODEL('CLAS_DECISION_TREE‘);

and then

DBMS_DATA_MINING.RENAME_MODEL('Decision_Tree_Method2', 'CLAS_DECISION_TREE');

Oracle Analytics Update & Plan for 2012

On Friday 16th December, Charlie Berger (Sr. Director, Product Management, Data Mining & Advanced Analytics) posted the following on the Oracle Data Mining forum on OTN.

“… soon you'll be able to use the new Oracle R Enterprise (ORE) functionality. ORE is currently in beta and is targeted to go General Availability in the near future. ORE brings additional functionality to the ODM Option, which will then be renamed to the Oracle Advanced Analytics Option to reflect the significant adv. analytical functionality enhancements. ORE will allow R users to write R scripts and run them inside the database and eliminate and/or minimize data movement in/out of the DB. ORE will provide R to SQL transparency for SQL push-down to in-DB SQL and and expanding library of Oracle in-DB statistical functions. Packages that cannot be pushed down will be run in embedded R mode while the DB manages all data flows to the multiple R engines running inside the DB.

In January, we'll open up a new OTN discussion forum specifically for Oracle R Enterprise focused technical discussions. Stay tuned.”

I’m looking forward to getting my hands on the new Oracle R Enterprise, in 2012. In particular I’m keen to see what additional functionality will be added to the Oracle Data Mining option in the DB.

So watch out for the rebranding to Oracle Advanced Analytics

Charlie – Any chance of an advanced copy of ORE and related DB bits and bobs.

Recent Wood Carvings

I’ve managed to get enough time over the past couple of days to finish some wood carvings that I started a couple of months ago.

An Angel for the Christmas Tree (beech)

A name plate for the house (beech)

A Sun face for the shed door (Ash)

Oracle Big Data Videos

Mark Townsend, Database Product Manager at Oracle gave a presentation on Big Data at the UKOUG conference and used the following videos to illustrate how a company can evolve their Big Data into useful and meaningful information.

Big Data – The Challenge

Big Data – Gold Mine or just Stuff

Big Data – Big Data Speaks

Big Data – Everything You Always Wanted to Know

Big Data – Little Data

My UKOUG Presentation on ODM PL/SQL API

On Wednesday 7th Dec I gave my presentation at the UKOUG conference in Birmingham. The main topic of the presentation was on using the Oracle Data Miner PL/SQL API to implement a model in a production environment.

There was a good turn out considering it was the afternoon of the last day of the conference.

I asked the attendees about their experience of using the current and previous versions of the Oracle Data Mining tool. Only one of the attendees had used the pre 11g R2 version of the tool.

From my discussions with the attendees, it looks like they would have preferred an introduction/overview type presentation of the new ODM tool. I had submitted a presentation on this, but sadly it was not accepted.  Not enough people had voted for it.

For for next year, I will submit an introduction/overview presentation again, but I need more people to vote for it. So watch out for the vote stage next June and vote of it.

Here are the links to the presentation and the demo scripts (which I didn’t get time to run)

My Presentation

Demo Script 1 – Exploring and Exporting model

Demo Script 2 – Import, Dropping and Renaming the model. Plus Queries that use the model

I’m an Oracle ACE

At 5:20pm today (Friday 2nd December), I received an email from the Oracle ACE program.  I had been nominated for the award of Oracle ACE.

“You have been chosen based on your significant contribution and activity in the Oracle technical community.  Like your fellow Oracle ACEs, you have demonstrated a proficiency in Oracle technology as well as a willingness to share your knowledge and experiences with the community.”

I am so honoured, considering the experts from around the world that are members of the Oracle ACE program.

The Oracle ACE Award is issued by the Oracle Corporation and the award is made to people who are know for their strong credentials in the Oracle community as enthusiasts, advocates and technical knowledge.

Oracle Big Data & Analytics Sessions at UKOUG Conference

There are a number of BIG Data and Analytics presentations at the UKOUG Conference in Birmingham (4th Dec – 7th Dec).

I’ve worked my way through the agenda grids for each day of the conference and I’ve come up with the following list.  If you are interested in BIG Data and Analytics these presentations are a must see

Monday	12:15-13:15	Exadata Live – Graham Wood – Hall 7A
5th Dec
Tuesday	9:00-10:00	Big Data-Are you ready – Mark Townsend – Hall 1
6th Dec	10:10-10:55	Who’s afraid of Analytic Functions – Alex Nuijten – Hall 5
	11:15-12:15	Analysing Your Data with Analytic Functions – Carl Dudley – Hall 9
	16:40-17:40	Mobile Analytics using OBIEE 11g – Jon Mead – Exec Room 1
Wednesday	9:00-10:00	Oracle 11g Database Automatic Parallelism – Joel Goodman – Hall 9
7th Dec	15:20-16:05	How to Deploy your Oracle Data Miner in a Live Environment - me

Exalytics Events over the next week

The BIWA SIG is hosting a techcast called “Using Oracle R Enterprise” on Wednesday 30th November, 2011 at noon EST (approx 6pm GMT).

The TechCast is being presented by Mark Hornick, Senior Manager, Oracle Advanced Analytics Development

URL for TechCast: https://stbeehive.oracle.com/bconf/confDetails?confID=334B:3BF0:owch:38893C00F42F38A1E0404498C8A6612B0004075AECF7&guest=true&confKey=608880
-- Web Conference ID: 303397
-- Web Conference Key: 608880
-- Dialup: 1-866-682-4770, ID 5548204, passcode 1234

Several analytic tool vendors have added R-integration to their software. However, Oracle is the largest company to throw their weight behind R. On October 3, Oracle unveiled their integration of R: Oracle R Enterprise (http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/features/features-oracle-r-enterprise-498732.html) as part of their Oracle Big Data Appliance announcement (http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/press/512001).

Oracle R Enterprise allows users to perform statistical analysis with advanced visualization on data stored in Oracle Database. Oracle R Enterprise enables scalable R solutions, while facilitating production deployment of R scripts and Hadoop based solutions, as well as integration of R results with Oracle BI Publisher and OBIEE dashboards.

Check out the Oracle YouTube video (5min), that demos how an Exalytics application that can analyse almost a billion records instantly.

If you are attending the UKOUG Conference in Birmingham, Jon Mead (RittmanMead) is giving a presentation called “What can Exalytics do for me?” and is on Tuesday 5th December @15:35, in the area above the box office.

Applying an ODM Model to new data in Oracle – Part 2

This is the second of a two part blog posting on using an Oracle Data Mining model to apply it to or score new data. The first part looked at how you can score data the DBMS_DATA_MINING.APPLY procedure for scoring data batch type process.

This second part looks at how you can apply or score the new data, using our ODM model, in a real-time mode, scoring a single record at a time.

PREDICTION Function

The PREDICTION SQL function can be used in many different ways. The following examples illustrate the main ways of using it. Again we will be using the same data set with data in our (NEW_DATA_TO_SCORE) table.

The syntax of the function is

PREDICTION ( model_name, USING attribute_list);

Example 1 – Real-time Prediction Calculation

In this example we will select a record and calculate its predicted value. The function will return the predicted value with the highest probability

SELECT cust_id, prediction(clas_decision_tree using *)
FROM   NEW_DATA_TO_SCORE
WHERE cust_id = 103001;

   CUST_ID PREDICTION(CLAS_DECISION_TREEUSING*)
---------- ------------------------------------
    103001                                    0

So a predicted class value is 0 (zero) and this has a higher probability than a class value of 1.

We can compare and check this results with the result that was produced using the DBMS_DATA_MINING.APPLY function (see previous blog post).

SQL> select * from new_data_scored
  2  where cust_id = 103001;

   CUST_ID PREDICTION PROBABILITY
---------- ---------- -----------
    103001          0           1
    103001          1           0

Here we can see that the class value of 0 has a probability of 1 (100%) and the class value of 1 has a probability of 0 (0%).

Example 2 – Selecting top 10 Customers with Class value of 1

For this we are selecting from our NEW_DATA_TO_SCORE table. We want to find the records that have a class value of 1 and has the highest probability. We only want to return the first 10 of these

SELECT cust_id
FROM    NEW_DATA_TO_SCORE
WHERE PREDICTION(clas_decision_tree using *) = 1
AND       rownum <=10;

   CUST_ID
----------
    103005
    103007
    103010
    103014
    103016
    103018
    103020
    103029
    103031
    103036

Example 3 – Selecting records based on Prediction value and Probability

For this example we want to find our from what Countries do the customer come from where the Prediction is 0 (wont take up offer) and the Probability of this occurring being 1 (100%). This example introduces the PREDICTION_PROBABILITY function. This function allows use to use the probability strength of the prediction.

select country_name, count(*)
from   new_data_to_score
where  prediction(clas_decision_tree using *) = 0
and    prediction_probability (clas_decision_tree using *) = 1
group by country_name
order by count(*) asc;

COUNTRY_NAME                               COUNT(*)
---------------------------------------- ----------
Brazil                                            1
China                                             1
Saudi Arabia                                      1
Australia                                         1
Turkey                                            1
New Zealand                                       1
Italy                                             5
Argentina                                        12
United States of America                        293

The examples that I have give above are only the basic examples of using the PREDICTION function. There are a number of other uses that include using the PREDICTION_COST, PREDICTION_SET, PREDICTION_DETAILS. Examples of these will be covered in a later blog post

Oracle Ireland: Data Centre Transformation Event 7th December

Oracle in Ireland is hosting a session called Data Centre Transformation on 7th December (9:30-13:00), in the Guinness Storehouse, St James Gate, Dublin 8.

The agenda for this session is

9:00	Registration & Coffee
10:00	The 21st Century Data Centre, Delivered by Oracle Solaris – Mike Ramchand
10:30	Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c – John Caulfield, Solutions Director
11:00	Oracle Virtualised Systems (VM 3.0) – Dave Patterson, Oracle Hardware
11:30	Coffee Break
12:00	Transformative Oracle Storage Solutions – Neil Caughey, Oracle Storage Business Unit
12:30	Extreme Performance with Oracle Exadata and Exalogic – Brian Grant, Oracle Exalogic Business Development Manager

To book your place on this event email oracle.events@ketchumpleon.com

Or register by following this web link.

I wont be at this event as I’ll be presenting in the afternoon at the UKOUG conference in Birmingham.