Welcome to the December issue of 'The Data Miner' - the official newsletter of SQL Server Data Mining. This periodic newsletter keeps you up-to-date with the latest happenings in the SQL Server Data Mining world and gives you useful tips to help you get the most from SQL Server Data Mining.

Data Mining Helps in Researchers’ Hunt for HIV Vaccine

The Centre for Clinical Immunology and Biomedical Statistics at Murdoch University Perth and Microsoft Research have created a graphical visualization (a dependency network) of associations between the human immune system and HIV sequences. These associations are useful for identifying vulnerabilities in the HIV virus which may lead to drug treatments and/or a vaccine for the virus. The dependency network shown  below highlights the associations between a particular immune system type (B5701) and mutations of the virus at amino-acid positions Nef9 and Nef116. These associations suggest that this part of the virus is attacked by the immune system of people with this type.

 Dependency network showing associations between human immune system and HIV sequences

The dependency network technology from Microsoft Research is available in SQL Server 2005 Data Mining.

SQL 2005 Data Mining Talks on PASS Community Summit CD

The 2004 PASS Community CD-ROM, available at www.sqlpass.org, features two talks on SQL Server 2005 Data Mining:

In "DTS and Data Mining: Expanding Capabilities with Analytics", Donald Farmer and Jamie MacLennan from the Microsoft SQL Server team talk about the close integration between SQL Server Integration Services  (formerly DTS) and Data Mining in SQL Server 2005.

In the second part of the three-part talk "The Complete, Integrated, End-to-End BI platform: How It's Done in SQL Server 2005", Ariel Netz  from the Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services team delves into the exciting new data mining features in Analysis Services 2005.

MovieClick Dataset Available on SQLServerDataMining.com

Many of you have been playing with the live MovieClick demo on SQLServerDataMining.com. The underlying data set is now publicly available as well, so you can build your own models on it. Feel free to download and mine to your heart's content.

Thin Mining With XML for Analysis

SQL Server 2005 Data Mining is of course an excellent platform for building rich client applications, but if you want a zero-footprint data mining app, that's easy to accomplish as well.  XML for Analysis (XMLA) is now the native protocol for Analysis Services 2005, so you can directly send your data mining prediction statements wrapped in a XMLA request from your web application without requiring additional client components like OLE DB or the XMLA SDK. The all-new XMLA ThinMiner application, now live on SQLServerDataMining.com, demonstrates this effectively. XMLA ThinMiner shows you the XMLA request it generates when you issue a prediction query,  as well as the raw XMLA response returned by the server.

RSS Feed For DM Tips and Tricks? You Got It!

The SQL Data Mining Tips and Tricks featured on SQLServerDataMining.com are now available to you via RSS. Enjoy the feed.

Back Issues

You can find previous issues of this newsletter here.

Thank you

The SQL Server Data Mining Team

Questions or comments?  E-mail  newsletter@sqlserverdatamining.com.