The second potentially interesting set of BI-related tools today I saw mentioned on Jamie MacLennan’s blog: a beta of SPSS Statistical Services for SQL2005, which you can find out more about here:
A quick look at the user guide, which is also downloadable, shows what it’s all about. For AS2005 users there’s an addin for the Business Intelligence Development Studio which allows you to do two things: create calculated columns in your dsv which bin/band/bucketise values (for example if you had a Customer Age column you could use this to create a column which grouped ages into a number of age range categories), and explore the data in SPSS. For SSIS users there are a bunch of data flow and transformation components to do things like interact with SPSS data sources, do anomaly detection, and use various SPSS statistical functions.
