Chronic care of diabetes comes with large amounts of data concerning the self- and clinical management of the disease. In this paper, we propose to treat that information from two different perspectives. Firstly, a predictive model of short-term glucose homeostasis relying on machine learning is presented with the aim of preventing hypoglycemic events and prolonged hyperglycemia on a daily basis. Second, data mining approaches are proposed as a tool for explaining and predicting the long-term glucose control and the incidence of diabetic complications.