SQL Server Data Mining

SQL Server Data Mining is not an application, but a service which comes licensed with SQL Server. The application interfaces for this technology include: BIDS (Business Intelligence Development Studio), SSMS (SQL Server Management Studio), Power Shell, and Excel (2007 or higher, with the free add-in from Microsoft). The main documentation is online through MSDN (for SQL Server 2008 R2, see http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb510517.aspx).

The technology includes ten algorithms:

• Microsoft Decision Trees
• Microsoft Clustering
• Microsoft Naive Bayes
• Microsoft Association
• Microsoft Sequence Clustering
• Microsoft Time Series
• Microsoft Neural Network
• Microsoft Logistic Regression
• Microsoft Linear Regression
• Text Mining (through Integration Services with Term Extraction and Term Lookup)

Unlike many commercial products, the Microsoft technology has an open API, and developers can extend the algorithms, or overwrite the provided algorithms.

You can learn more from the Microsoft Product Team's website http://www.sqlserverdatamining.com or the data mining resource at http://www.marktab.net