Data mining involves extracting useful patterns from large amounts of data. It uses software tools to analyze raw data and discover hidden patterns that can help businesses gain insights into customer behavior and develop effective marketing strategies. The key processes involved in data mining are data cleaning, integration, transformation, mining, pattern evaluation, and presentation. Data mining is commonly used for applications like classification, association, prediction, clustering, and regression. It has proven useful in domains such as healthcare for improving treatment and education for enhancing learning outcomes. Popular tools for data mining include Oracle Data Mining, IBM SPSS Modeler, RapidMiner, Apache Mahout, Weka, and KNIME.