Attribute association discovery techniques that support relational-based data mining are disclosed. In one aspect of the invention, a technique for mining attribute associations in a relational data set comprises the following steps/operations. Multiple items are obtained from the relational data set. Then, attribute associations are discovered using: (i) multi-attribute mining templates formed from at least a portion of the multiple items; and (ii) one or more mining preferences specified by a user. The invention provides a novel architecture for the mining search space so as to exploit the inter-relationships among patterns of different templates. The framework is relational-sensitive and supports interactive and online mining.