"As I sit here writing this on my Apple Mac I have to report that, having looked at the data mining services in Microsoft SQL Server, I am very impressed! Not always an easy thing for those of us who try to avoid Microsoft like to admit. Currently data mining is very much the preserve of only a relatively small group of either statistically trained modellers, or experienced and enthusiastic IT Business Intelligence professionals. What Microsoft has done is to make data mining available on the desktop to everyone. Now models can be built by anyone who is a VB developer, and the way that the queries can be run and presented will be familiar to anyone who uses Excel. But it must be emphasised that this is not a toy, this is fully-fledged corporate data mining, because the algorithms are embedded into the kernel of the database so that everything scales, and operation is fast and reliable."