Several questions about Enterprise version (Rapidminer)

steve2010

Hi,

I am evaluating some commercial Data Mining/BI solution packages recently,and need your help for several questions as follows before making order.

1. Could i get trial of Enterprise Version like 30 days so that i know more about the difference between community version and Enterprise version?

2. Does Enterprise version support Client/Server or Browser/Server framework? if not, how could enterprise version support multiple users? is there any plan to support that if not now?

3. What is the exact feature list of BI in RapidMiner Enterprise version? Are BI features supported in community version?

4. What is the advantage of RapidMiner compared with DM/BI products from SAS and SPSS? especially from technical view.

Thanks in advance.

Steve

IngoRM

Hello,

for getting answers to those questions I would like to suggest to contact Rapid-I directly at

contact@rapid-i.com

or

+49 231 425 786 90

We try to be as active here in this forum as possible but sometimes (like now) we are too busy with projects / Enterprise Support etc. and have not enough time to be as active as we would like to be. For questions about the commercial Enterprise Edition as well as , however, you can always contact us under the address above and we will get in touch.

1. Could i get trial of Enterprise Version like 30 days so that i know more about the difference between community version and Enterprise version?

Contact us under the address above.

2. Does Enterprise version support Client/Server or Browser/Server framework? if not, how could enterprise version support multiple users? is there any plan to support that if not now?

This is actually on our list but not fully supported yet. But this does not have to be a drawback. Please note that the main focus of RapidMiner is data mining and predictive analytics and this is often much more explorative than the "simple" reporting stuff of more traditional BI. Sharing processes and providing them to "viewers" (like in traditional BI) is hence a less important use case. A client / server architecture is therefore not as necessary than for traditional BI with more or less fixed reports, a couple of report designers (which have to share their processes) and lots of viewers.

Although many of the reporting needs are also fulfilled by the RapidMiner Enterprise Edition, the reporting engine should be seen as a powerful tool to support your data analysis and creating nice views of results. Last but not the least, the reported results (like prediction of sales for the next quarters instead of only reporting the last quarters' sales) can be easily integrated into (existing or other) BI reports. We had done this before for example by integrating a RM EE report into a Cognos report. That's pretty nice.

3. What is the exact feature list of BI in RapidMiner Enterprise version?

A feature overview can be found at

http://rapid-i.com/content/view/123/141/

Just click on the row headers in order to get more information. For more details or discussions please contact our office at the address above.

Are BI features supported in community version?

Hardly any. The Community Edition supports all data mining which is also available in the Enterprise Edition. However, the CE lacks of the reporting engine which is quite essential for BI. Beside that, the Enterprise Edition also offers

• Decreased runtimes by parallel processing on multiple cores
• Early bugfixes and new features much faster than for the CE
• Support
• Guarantees

For more information, please have a look at the web page above and contact us for more details.

4. What is the advantage of RapidMiner compared with DM/BI products from SAS and SPSS? especially from technical view.

Well, try it yourself! Oh, you can't for SAS? That's a shame 

This is really hard to answer (and I am also a bit biased) but one of the main advantages is probably the power of the DM processes possible with RapidMiner. You have to get used to them but after that you will learn that you can do much more (complex) things with RM than for example with SPSS Clementine. For SAS, the distinction is somewhat more difficult since you can rely on a GUI (which is in my opinion less powerful than that of RM) or on scripting (which is as powerful as RM but also hard to learn).

I also really like the visualizations of RM a lot.

And last but not least the tree / process representation which is close to the algorithmical thinking of mathematics / computer science but which is hard at the beginning since you often do not explicitly see the data flow (which is actually always the same...)


Hope that you will get in contact with us. All the best,
Ingo