Welcome to the June 2005 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.

In This Issue (click topic to go directly to it):

• SQL 2005 Data Mining Helps Seattle Times Target the Right Customers

• SQL Server 2005 June Community Technology Preview Available For Public Download

• Data Mining Lab Gets Top Rating At Tech.Ed 2005

• New SQL 2005 Data Mining Articles  in MSDN Magazine

• SIGMOD Record Features SQL Data Mining Standards

• Data Mining Webcasts: Reloaded

• NOTICE: SQLServerDataMining.Com Downtime

SQL 2005 Data Mining Helps Seattle Times Target the Right Customers

This ComputerWorld article describes how The Seattle Times worked with Apollo Data Technologies to build predictive models to identify the right customer segments to target for promotions. The Seattle Times hopes to use the technology to combat declining newspaper subscriptions. The article quotes Seattle Times' director of systems development as saying that "the use of SQL Server [Data Mining] will enable easy integration with other SQL Server databases and .Net applications already in use." The newspaper's IT organization will run the SQL Server Data Mining models developed by Apollo against their 1.6 million subscriber database to produce targeted promotions.

SQL Server 2005 June Community Technology Preview Available For Public Download

The June CTP is the first pre-release version of SQL Server 2005 that's available for general testing. Previous versions have been available only to customers enrolled in the SQL Server 2005 beta program or those with an MSDN subscription. Go ahead and download this stable release and experiment with the cool data mining technology in SQL Server 2005. And don't forget to share this link with your customers and friends in the industry.

Data Mining Lab Gets Top Rating At Tech.Ed 2005

SQL Server Data Mining had a significant presence at Tech.Ed 2005 with two talks (Smart BI: Integrating Data Mining Across the SQL Server Business Intelligence Stack, Building Intelligent Applications Using SQL Server 2005 Data Mining), a Q&A session (Data Mining in SQL Server 2005 Analysis Services) and a hands-on lab (Data Mining With SQL Server 2005) that was rated #1 in the database labs.

New SQL 2005 Data Mining Articles  in MSDN Magazine

In "Say What? Make Sense of Your Web Feedback using SQL Server 2005", Peter Kim shows us how to mine the reams of unstructured text data that typical web sites gather from their feedback forms. This article highlights how the text processing transforms in Integration Services fit together with SQL Server Data Mining to enable this common text classification scenario on the SQL Server 2005 platform.

SQL Server Data Mining team member Liu Tang collaborates with Paul Bradley from Apollo Data Technologies on this article that guides you through the intricacies of building your own data mining application using AMO, the powerful new object model for programmatically building and manipulating data mining and OLAP objects in SQL Server 2005 - check out "Mine Your Business: AMO Lets You Dig Deeper into Your Data from Your Own Applications".

SIGMOD Record Features SQL Server Data Mining Standards

The June 2005 issue of SIGMOD Record, the monthly magazine of the ACM's Special Interest Group on Management of Data (SIGMOD), features Building Data Mining Solutions with OLE DB for DM and XML for Analysis, an overview of SQL Server Data Mining from a standards perspective.

Data Mining Webcasts: Reloaded

In case you missed Jamie MacLennan's "Overview of SQL Server 2005 Data Mining"  TechNet webcast on May 25, the replay is now available. His previous MSDN webcast is also available for on-demand viewing: check out  Putting the "Smart" in Smart Client: Using Data Mining for Data Validation in Your Smart Client Applications.

And here are the upcoming SQL Server Data Mining live webcasts:

MSDN Webcast: Intelligent Applications: Embedding Data Mining in Your Application (Level 300)
Thursday, June 30, 2005 [9:00 A.M.–10:00 A.M. Pacific Time]
MSDN Webcast: Leverage Data Mining in Integration, Analysis and Reporting Stack of BI (Level 300)
Thursday, July 7, 2005 [1:00 P.M.–2:00 P.M. Pacific Time]

Back Issues

You can find previous issues (as well the current edition) of this newsletter here.

Thank you

The SQL Server Data Mining Team

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