SSAS - New Data Mining book

Through the wonders of Amazon I have just received a copy of the recently-released "Data Mining with SQL Server 2005" by ZhaoHui Tang and Jamie MacLennan (waiting for new technical books to reach the Australian shelves is excruciating). It's always great to get books written by the people who actually built the product. Some may say that you don't get as objective a view as you would with a neutral author. Just the same you can be assured that there are no greater experts on that particular piece of technology. I'm really looking forward to reading this one. Data Mining really has taken a step up in this version and should not be ignored as many of us (esp. me) have done in the past.

At present I am not aware of any other significant sources of data mining material (pertaining to SQL 2005) that does not emanate from either Jamie, ZhaoHui or the rest of the MS Data Mining team. There's tons of great stuff (webcasts, white papers, sample code, tips & tricks etc. etc.) on their site. Jamie also has a blog. If anyone is aware of any DM bloggers or other sites I out there please let me know.

On the topic of SQL team members publishing books I can certainly recommend buying a copy of Donald Farmer's "Scripting SQL Server 2005 Integration Services" - a must for beginning a good SSIS reference library.

Also worth a read is The Scalability Experts' "Microsoft SQL Server 2005 - Changing the Paradigm". A great overall view of what is in the product at considerable depth. Lots of relevant, simple code examples and good explanations of new features. The BI components get several good size chapters but, of course, this is a book about the whole product.

There are many more good SQL 2005 books on the way...