Data Mining with Microsoft® SQL Server® 2008

Chapter 4. Using SQL Server Data Mining

This chapter reviews the Analysis Services toolset and provides techniques to effectively create and analyze mining models. Before reading this chapter, you should be familiar with the model-building concepts introduced in Chapter 3. In particular, you should understand the concepts of mining structures, mining models, mining model columns, and case and nested tables.

This chapter is designed to help novice users get started, as well as provide experienced users with techniques that will help them get the most out of the toolset. This is not meant to be a substitute or a replacement for the excellent documentation and tutorials found in the product documentation. Rather, it describes and applies the general tools provided with Analysis Services specifically for data mining purposes.

This chapter describes features of Analysis Services through the user interface, and provides step-by-step instructions for creating a set of mining models for illustrative purposes. Feel free to deviate from these instructions and explore the concepts introduced in the chapter. If you stray too far, starting over is not difficult, or you can always pick up the completed project file contained in Chapter4.zip on this book's companion website (www.wiley.com/go/data_mining_SQL_2008) for examination.

We will be using the MovieClick database to exemplify tool usage. This database is described in Appendix A.

This chapter covers the following topics:

• Using the Business Intelligence ...