SQL 2005 Data Mining Gains Mindshare At KDD-2005

SQL Server 2005 Data Mining had a prominent presence again this year at KDD, the foremost data mining research and industry conference, held August 21-24 in Chicago.

The SQL Data Mining booth had several machines set up for attendees to explore the product through tutorials and demo applications that showcased its wide-ranging capabilities and integration with other BI components in the SQL Server 2005 product family, including Reporting Services and Integration Services. Bogdan Crivat, from the SQL Data Mining development team, also unveiled a framework he is working on that allows customers and independent software developers to easily develop plug-in algorithms for SQL Server 2005 Data Mining using CLR languages like C# or VB.NET. This will soon be available for download from www.sqlserverdatamining.com.

On the partner front, SPSS and KXEN shared booth space with the SQL DM team, eliciting much interest and excitement with their SQL Server 2005 integration pieces. SPSS demonstrated their data exploration and data preparation elements integrated into the Business Intelligence Development Studio alongside the SQL Server 2005 designers, while KXEN showed off their specialized plug-in algorithm for classification.

SQL Server 2005 September CTP Available For Public Download

The September Community Technology Preview is the second and last pre-release version of SQL Server 2005. This is a stable release that's very close to the final product that will be released later this year, so go ahead - download it, make sure your beta applications still work and try out some new ones that take advantage of the full spectrum of data mining features in SQL Server 2005.

Data Mining Lab Wins Top Rating At TechReady1 2005

In a repeat of the performance at Tech.Ed 2005 earlier this year, SQL Server Data Mining took the top spot when the user ratings came for the hands-on labs at Microsoft's internal training event for its field personnel - TechReady1 2005.  This week-long event, held in Seattle in August this year, included presentations and labs on a broad range of new and upcoming products across all Microsoft businesses.

More Data Mining Webcasts Available On-Demand

The SQL Data Mining team has been presenting live webcasts on MSDN and TechNet frequently over the past months. For your convenience, these have been made available on-demand as well. Here's a list of on-demand links, including recent additions:

• MSDN Webcast: Applying SQL Server 2005 Data Mining to Enterprise Business Problems (Level 300)

• MSDN Webcast: Incorporating Data Mining into the Integration, Analysis and Reporting Components of Business Intelligence (Level 300)

• MSDN Webcast: Intelligent Applications: Embedding Data Mining in Your Application (Level 300)

• MSDN Webcast: Putting the "Smart" in Smart Client: Using Data Mining for Data Validation in Your Smart Client Applications (Level 200)

• TechNet Webcast: Overview of SQL Server 2005 Data Mining (Level 200)

Tips and Tricks At SQLServerDataMining.Com

Many of you are probably subscribers to the TipsNTricks RSS feed from SQLServerDataMining.com. For those of you who aren't aware of this: the SQL Data Mining team regularly posts short (and sometimes long) articles that address various practical issues and scenarios that you might encounter as you delve deeper into SQL Server 2005 Data Mining. To pique your interest, here is a sampling of recent tips:

• Working with temporary models

• Mining in-memory data

• Sample DMX Queries using Adventure Works DW

• A scorecard for Logistic Regression models

• Renaming Clusters with Integration Services

SQL Server Data Mining Resources

·         SQL Server Data Mining Community Site

·         SQL Server 2005 Newsgroups

·         Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Web Site

·         SQL Server Developer’s Center 

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