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Today is a busy day.
Reviewing a couple of chapters for a book on SQL and XML, writing a report on some data warehouse scalability recommendations, writing two Biztalk integration scenarios, and dealing with some other urgent things. CNET today has an article discussing data mining with Usama Fayyad, who initiated the data mining framework for Microsoft's SQL Server before starting his own company. Usama feels that specialized data mining will be useful only in niche applications and will generally require lots of domain expertise and support. In my opinion, there will always be a lucrative but small market for the very specialized and cutting-edge algorithms that Fayyad likes to tackle, but data mining is way too exciting and powerful to keep from the masses. Hopefully the cutting-edge research will continue to trickle down into the commodity database engines and will find use in a much wider variety of applications.