Geology is traditionally a descriptive science that involves field observations and in-depth investigations of physical structures. Therefore, geologic data conventionally has been collected and measured qualitatively by describing colors, textures and many other surface characteristics. Today, the market requires geological analysts to go beyond a descriptive or qualitative analysis of nature. Federal University of Rio de Janeiro is the oldest university in Brazil and one of the oldest engineering schools in the world. Geology students at the university use SAS to manipulate and analyze large amounts of data. SAS now makes it easy for the students to conduct advanced quantitative research and to create advanced predictive models based on quantitative data.

Data mining can uncover useful information buried in vast amounts of data. However, it is often the case that many users that could benefit from these results do not have any data mining expertise. To date, most predictive analytic operations require the extraction of data to a separate analytic server where the data cannot be easily joined back to the other sources. This limits the analysis of the results and also constrains the use of predictive analytic functions. The Oracle Enterprise Edition database is currently the only database available that provides a complete analytic engine that incorporates analytic and predictive functions and Warehouse Builder is the only enterprise level business intelligence integration tool that can fully leverage the features of the Oracle database.