It was originally created by the database systems research unit at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, Germany, led by Professor Hans-Peter Kriegel.

It aims at allowing the development and evaluation of advanced data mining algorithms and their interaction with database index structures.

The object-oriented architecture allows the combination of arbitrary algorithms, data types, distance functions, indexes, and evaluation measures.

The Java just-in-time compiler optimizes all combinations to a similar extent, making benchmarking results more comparable if they share large parts of the code.

When developing new algorithms or index structures, the existing components can be easily reused, and the type safety of Java detects many programming errors at compile time.

As research project, it currently does not offer integration with business intelligence applications or an interface to common database management systems via SQL.

For example, custom data types, distance functions, index structures, algorithms, input parsers, and output modules can be added and combined without modifying the existing code.

The visualization module uses SVG for scalable graphics output, and Apache Batik for rendering of the user interface as well as lossless export into PostScript and PDF for easy inclusion in scientific publications in LaTeX.

[15] Version 0.6 (June 2013) introduces a new 3D adaption of parallel coordinates for data visualization, apart from the usual additions of algorithms and index structures.

[18] Version 0.8 (October 2022) adds automatic index creation, garbage collection, and incremental priority search, as well as many more algorithms such as BIRCH.