Data Mining

The Santa Cruz Experiment: Why You Should Care About Big Data

[This was first posted to Technorati on February 6th, 2012. You can read the original here.] I keep hearing the term “Big Data”. My old-school IT instincts always makes me think of inefficiently storing two-letter state abbreviation codes inside of an nvarchar(50) field because that’s the default data type you get when creating a database table from [...]

SQL 2008 Data Mining

I often hear people use the terms “Data Mining” and “Data Analysis” as if they are interchangeable. To me, at least, they mean two very distinct things. Hopefully this post will help to explain what I believe to be the difference in their meanings.
So, let’s say you are opening up a mine. First things first, [...]