More Data Mining in the Cloud?

Since we released the Tech Preview of the Cloud Data Mining Addins last year, I've heard about and talked with Michael Zeller of Zementis.  Zementis has been very active in shaping the PMML (Predictive Modeling Markup Language) standard for representing learned knowledge in XML format.  They have a product called ADAPA that allows you to score, or predict from, arbitrary data sets using arbitrary PMML models.

Recently they released a version of ADAPA for the Amazon Cloud service and it has been very popular for them.  I just recieved a note from Michael showing how you can integrate ADAPA with SQL Server Integration Services.  Basically ADAPA exposes each model as a web mothod that you can call from the SSIS Web Services task.  It's up to you to populate SSIS variables from data and subsequently take the results from a variable and archive them, but it does give you the ability to take models generated in other data mining tools, such as SAS and SPSS and integrate them into your SQL Server workflows.

Hopefully Zementis will release an SSIS transform version of their service to make the usage more natural with SQL Server Integration Services, or better yet, offer a SQL Server Data Mining PlugIn version of their PMML reader so that you can use DMX against your SAS or SPSS models for integration into applications/reporting services/Excel Addins/etc.

 Let me know what you think and I'll pass the info on to Michael, or if you happen to be going to Paris this summer, you can catch him at the SIG KDD Data Mining Conference at the end of June where he'll be running a panel on Emerging Trends in Open Standards and Cloud Computing for Data Mining