Professional Microsoft® SQL Server® Analysis Services 2008 with MDX

18.3. Data Mining Tools

Table Analytics is aimed at end users who might not have knowledge of data mining. The Table Analytics tools do use the functionality of data mining but do not provide the full-fledged functionality of creating, refining, and viewing the models like you would have with Business Intelligence Development Studio. In addition, some end users might have in-depth knowledge of data mining and would like to create their own data mining models on the data in an Excel spreadsheet.

In this section you learn to create, refine, and view a data mining model on data in an Excel spreadsheet using the Data Mining Tools add-ins that are part of the Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Data Mining Add-ins for Office 2007. You learn to create a classification mining model using the sample data set that has been provided as part of the DMAddins_SampleData.xlsx document. You first need to select the Source Data worksheet and then select the Data Mining tab. You will then see the Data Mining Ribbon shown in Figure 18-26.

Figure 18.26. Figure 18-26

If you have used the Business Intelligence Development Studio (BIDS) for creating data mining models, you might think that the icons in the Data Mining Ribbon will be able to support the features you have seen in BIDS. You are correct. Most of the features supported in BIDS can be accomplished on the data within the worksheet. In this section ...