Data mining, the extraction of hidden predictive information from large databases, is a powerful new technology with great potential to help companies focus on the most important information in their data warehouses. It plays a significant role on human activities and has become an essential component in various fields of human life. Data mining is greatly inspired by advancements in Statistics, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, Pattern Recognition and Computation capabilities. It is the knowledge discovery process which analyzes the large volumes of data from various perspectives and summarizes it into useful information. This paper focuses the major study of data mining, its scopes, its tools and techniques, its applications and advantages/disadvantages.