Financial Data Mining in MySQL

What are the best ways to conduct financial data mining in MySQL? From browsing the World Wide Web, it looks like using R to access MySQL and using some pre-built R financial data analysis packages is the way to go. Is there anything built-in to MySQL 5.2 Workbench, or, any other possibilities

DECIMAL datatype automatically makes blank become 0

Hi-- I'm using MySQL 5.2 Workbench, and when I import a csv into MySQL, blank values become 0 when I define the datatype to be a DECIMAL (in our case (DECIMAL(12,2)). Since there is the potential for values to be 0, this poses a problem for us. I initially wanted to make all the DECIMAL values