Professional Microsoft® SQL Server® Analysis Services 2008 with MDX

Chapter 18. Using Data Mining with Office 2007

In Chapter 16 you learned about data mining and how it is useful for analyzing data and helping you make decisions that will improve your business. Traditionally, data mining has been considered a specialized area and you need to have an in-depth understanding of the data mining algorithm to create and analyze data mining models and to recognize interesting patterns in the data set. We believe that you still need to understand data mining to effectively replicate the mining models using Business Intelligence Development Studio. SQL Server 2008, however, aims at making data mining available to end users in an intuitive way that helps them to analyze the data without having to understand data mining.

The Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Data Mining Add-ins for Office 2007 shipped with SQL Server 2008 help end users analyze data in Excel. There are three components that are part of this add-in: Table Analytics, Data Mining Client, and Visualization. Table Analytics and Data Mining Client are add-ins for Excel, and Visualization is a Visio template to effectively visualize and present data mining. In this chapter you learn how to analyze data using the Data Mining Add-ins for Excel 2007 and then learn how to effectively present data mining models using Visio 2007.

The Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Data Mining Add-ins for Office 2007 is a redistribution package available for download from www.microsoft.com as part of the SQL Server 2008 release. ...