Book Review: Data Mining with SQL Server 2005 by ZhaoHui Tang

Decent Book

At the time I'm writing this review this book is the only one available dedicated solely to the data mining features of SQL Server 2005. The book is good, but I was disappointed in it as well on three fronts. First, there is a chapter dedicated to each of the data mining algorithms. I didn't find the business use case examples for when, why, and how to use each algorithm sufficient. Second, each of the algorithm chapters goes off the deep-end explaining the mathematical basis for the algorithm. There are very, very few developers who are going to remember enough of their college mathematics to follow along. Third, the technical coverage of how to use the APIs and the data mining extension language (DMX) is superficial, particularly with DMX. After reading this book cover to cover I couldn't go off and write a DMX query if I wanted to. On the application I'm working on we are planning to implement our own web visualization viewers for the data mining algorithms. This book didn't give me what I needed in understanding the object model exposed by the APIs in order to handle the back-end coding for this. All in all, if you are planning to do data mining with SQL Server 2005 I would recommend this book only because at the time of this writing there is nothing else available. However, you will learn quite a bit about data mining with it and depending on your prior experience (more is better) it might be an excellent fit for you.

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