Jamie's Junk : Visio

Data Mining Virtual Hands-on Lab Now Available! Also, in other news, Donald in a fishbowl!

JamieMac — Tue, 24 Jul 2007 01:49:00 GMT

For those of you who have been dying to try out the data mining addins we released earlier this year - here's your chance! Ok, scratch that, if you're reading my blog you've been there done that, but if there's that someone special who you know would love the addins and hadn't had the chance to get everything configured to give them a go, have I got a deal for you!

Since the Data Mining Addins hands-on lab was ranked in the top 10 of all labs at TechEd (it was, in fact, #2), it earned a special distinction of being made available as an online hands-on lab where you can reserve 90 minutes of time to remotely operate machine to walk through the exercises. Try it out today!

While you're waiting, you can watch our Principal Program Manager, Donald Farmer interview a customer (who had coincidentally just finished the lab) in the "Tech-Ed" fishbowl.

Important Update for the Data Mining Addins!

JamieMac — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 02:04:00 GMT

Due to a late found performance regression we decided to rerelease the data mining addins. A change we made in the product shortly before release was causing queries in the Data Mining Client for Excel to take several minutes instead of several seconds. With the fix, for example, I can do a prediction query against 10,000 rows in Excel and have the results populated back in to the worksheet in under 20 seconds on my laptop.

I recommend that everybody download the update and install the new version. In addition to the query performance fix, there are also performance fixes for the column selection wizard page and continuous valued scatter plots. We also made some fixes to ensure that users of SQL Server Standard Edition have a good user experience. Users of SQL Server Standard Edition will have to install the SP2 Cumulative Hotfix update in addition to the new addins.

As always keep in touch with the data mining team and ask questions through our MSDN forum - we're happy to help out and love to hear any suggestions to improve the product.

Data Mining Addins Released to Web!

JamieMac — Tue, 20 Feb 2007 22:52:00 GMT

The SQL Server 2005 Data Mining Add-ins for Office 2007 have finally released to web yesterday along with SP2 of SQL Server 2005. The DM team has done a great write-up on how to get the add-ins (and everything else necessary) and also a really nice whitepaper giving an overview of the tools.

While you're at it, you should check out the SP2 release of SQL Server 2005 - there are innumerable improvements to data mining and OLAP in Analysis Services that maybe I'll get around to numerating one of these days. Some notable are incredible OLAP calc performance increases and an interesting new DMX semantic.... I'll keep you guessing until I post again.

Enjoy the Addins and the rest of SP2! You're feedback is definately welcome!

update: Donald delivers a much more eloquent description of the value of the Add-ins

Try out the Data Mining Addins for Office 2007 FREE for 60 days!

JamieMac — Sat, 30 Dec 2006 10:52:00 GMT

OK, I admit it's a wierd title, since the addins are free anyway, but you do have to have SQL Server 2005 and Office 2007 to use them. However, you can now get all the parts necessary for a free trail download and for the icing on the cake, download the always-free Data Minig addins!

First, you need to download the 180 day trial SQL Server 2005 Evaluation Edition and install SQL Server 2005 Analysis Services (you can install all the rest as well, but the other parts aren't needed for teh addins)

Next, upgrade the eval edition to SQL Server 2005 SP2 December Community Technical Preview (CTP 3) Technically, this isn't 100% necessary, but since you're busy downloading everything anyway, you might as well. If you have installed previous CTP's of SP2, this step is necessary.

Now download and install the 60 day trials for Office 2007 Professional and Visio 2007 from the Office Online site. You're going to want to make sure you install the .NET programmability pieces, which are installed by default if you already have .NET (hint - install .NET 2.0 first...)

Finally, you can download and install the Data Mining Addins CTP! By default just the Table Analytic Tools for Excel are installed - I recommend (of course) installing the Data Mining Client for Excel and the Data Mining Template for Visio as well - just select the options during install.

After you've gotten all this working - please provide feedback at http://connect.microsoft.com/ - we still have a few weeks before we cut the final version so your feedback will definately help! Even if there are ideas that can't get into this version, there's always v2!

Happy Holidays and thanks from me and the SQL Server DM team!

Your chance to see the Data Mining Office Addins for yourself!

JamieMac — Sat, 18 Nov 2006 01:29:00 GMT

I was happily surprised at the reception of the Addins at my presentation at PASS in Seattle yesterday - one report was that the audience was "drooling". If you're one that just couldn't make it to Seattle this week - no sweat! I will be presenting the Addins during a webcast on November 27. So if you're all filled up from a Thanksgiving weekend (in the US at least) you can sit down Monday morning and see what all the excitement is about! (just don't drool on your keyboard!). You can register online for the webcast here.

More Visio Data Mining Diagrams at SQLServerDataMining.com

JamieMac — Sun, 12 Nov 2006 11:57:00 GMT

I've added a couple more diagrams to the LiveSample page at sqlserverdatamining.com. This time there's a Clustering diagram showing three different views of the same cluster model, plus a Dependency Net made from the MovieClick data available on the site.

Enjoy! Next week I'll round out the set with a regression tree sample - let me know if there's anything else you'd like to see!

-Later

New Live Sample - Visio Data Mining Diagrams on the Web!

JamieMac — Thu, 09 Nov 2006 12:46:00 GMT

I've been playing around and testing the Data Mining Templates for Visio 2007 (part of the Data Mining Addins for Office 2007) and it's even more fun than I imagined when we came up with the feature. Last week I audited a new BI course for ISV's that is being developed and saw how they created a schema diagram in Visio and then simply used Visio to publish to the web. I had one of those giant "no duh" moments and immediately started creating data mining models as web pages! Finally, through our integration efforts with Office and the built in features of Visio, thin client model viewing is here!

In any case, I posted a single model as a "Live Sample" here - more to come! Don't be afraid to try out the other Live Samples while you're around!

Data Mining Addins for Office 2007 Preview Build Now Available!

JamieMac — Wed, 08 Nov 2006 04:53:00 GMT

Download at your pleasure from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=aa0c2623-b432-4a1f-9a3c-9d64df130a61&DisplayLang=en

Enjoy!

Important Excerpts from the download page:

If you have questions about the Data Mining Add-ins, visit the SQL Server Data Mining Forum on MSDN.

Help improve the Data Mining Add-ins by submitting bugs to the Connect Feedback Center.

Analyst comments on the upcoming SQL Server 2005 Data Mining Addins for Office 2007

JamieMac — Sat, 04 Nov 2006 20:29:00 GMT

A few weeks ago I did an analyst briefing with David Norris of Bloor research on Microsoft's data mining strategy. I wasn't really expecting any press out of it, but he wrote up this article on his impressions

Sometimes Microsoft does things very well

He also gave it a mention in a somewhat unrelated article the next day

SPSS continue to develop as a solutions provider

If you want to see what all the hubbub is about, watch this space! Our release of CTP2 of SQL Server 2005 SP2 is imminent, and with that you will be able to download and play with a preview release of these addins yourself!