BI review & help

Today I was in the Microsoft's Data Mining Conference which took place in the Sheraton City Tower, Ramat-Gan (Israel, of course). First of all - the food was good. Now, seriously: All the lectures were great, although they were performed by one man - Rafal Lukaweichi, which is a very talented speaker. I think that I haven't seen such enthusiasm for many years in a lecture in the IT world. Anyway, what have I learned today?

• The Data Mining world is very interesting indeed. Microsoft has a lot to offer in DM and it is all ready-to-use in BIDS.
• Microsoft's approach is DM to the masses, which I don't believe it myself. Even though the tools are very simple and even the code (DMX) is easy (in contradiction to MDX), I don't think that an inexperienced developer can bring good results. The SAS approach says that you need to have deep knowledge in statistics (which is bad), but I don't think that DM can be made by the masses.
• There are many different DM algorithms which you need to be introduced with before you start mining. As I mentioned, they tell you that all you need to know is what each algorithm does in general, but in fact there are many parameters which you need to adjust and play with, so in fact you need a good knowledge of these algorithms.
• Visualization is very important in DM. Even after you have good results in your hands, you need good UI tools to show you the results in an efficient way or else you'll be lost in a jungle of data.
  
• If you already have a datawarehouse, you're half way from mining models. The preparation of the data is a huge amount of the job in DM.
• After you have good results and even after you got good visualization of the results, you need an expert from the company you work for (or in) that will look at the results and tell you whether they bring new knowledge or they trivial.

I don't believe there's a change I'll be mining in the near future, but maybe I'll play with it a little in my free time (which of course I don't have). Taking the data of our datawarehouse and mining it can bring some interesting stuff. Who knows.