Data Mining with Microsoft® SQL Server® 2008

Chapter 16. Programming SQL Server Data Mining

The concept of data mining as a platform technology opens up the doors for the possibility of a new breed of intelligent applications. An intelligent application is one that does not need custom code to handle various circumstances. Instead, it learns business rules directly from the data. Additionally, as business rules change, intelligent applications are updated automatically by reprocessing the models that represent the business logic.

Examples of intelligent applications are cross-sales applications that provide insightful recommendations to your users, call center applications that show only customers with a reasonable chance of making a purchase, and order-entry systems that validate data as it is entered without any custom code. These are just the tip of the iceberg. The flexibility and extensibility of the SQL Server Data Mining programming model will excite the creativity of the developer, leading to the invention of even more types of intelligent applications.

Chapter 15 explained that the core communication protocol for Analysis Services is XML for Analysis (XMLA). This protocol provides a highly flexible, platform-independent method for accessing your data mining server. Everything that can be done between the client and the server can be done through XMLA. However, just because you can do it the hard way doesn't mean that you have to.

This chapter reviews programming interfaces and object models that make it easy to write ...