Microsoft® SQL Server 2008 R2 Unleashed

Data Mining

With SSAS, a much more robust selection of capabilities for data mining is available..

Data mining is the process of understanding potentially undiscovered characteristics or distributions of data. Data mining can be extremely useful for OLAP database design in that patterns or values might define different hierarchy levels or dimensions that were not previously known. As you create dimensions, you can even choose a data mining model as the basis for a dimension.

Basically, a data mining model is a reference structure that represents the grouping and predictive analysis of relational or multidimensional data. It is composed of rules, patterns, and other statistical information of the data that it was analyzing. These are called ...