Data Mining Donald

OK, here's a tidbit of news that not many of you will hear anywhere else. My friend and secret informant at MS, Donald Farmer, has just left the SSIS team in favor of the data mining team. Now, I talked to Donald about this last week, and he doesn't think he's blog-worthy, but that's where he's wrong and I'll tell you why. After talking to Donald about the reasons for his move, and what he hopes to accomplish, i

OK, here's a tidbit of news that not many of you will hear anywhere else. My friend and secret informant at MS, Donald Farmer, has just left the SSIS team in favor of the data mining team. Now, I talked to Donald about this last week, and he doesn't think he's blog-worthy, but that's where he's wrong and I'll tell you why. After talking to Donald about the reasons for his move, and what he hopes to accomplish, it was clear to me that this is something we all need. Data mining is the future, and as of yet, it's still far too complicated for the ordinary IT guy to grasp. Donald's hope is to bring a much simpler process to data mining, and make it so that any DBA or even educated business user can do it. Why do I think we all need Donald to make this leap? Well, because put simply… Donald actually cares about it. There's a fire in his voice that you don't hear often in this industry anymore, and anyone with that kind of fire can make things happen. It's like being a chef. Someone can teach you how to cook, but you'll never be truly great unless you're a real foodie. That's what Donald is I guess… a data mining foodie! I have another friend at MS right now who's trying to learn to code C++. The only problem is his heart's not in it and I can tell he'll learn just enough to get by. He'll never be great.

So for this reason, I think that Donald is very blog-worthy, and I'm personally very excited at the prospect of having someone with that level of excitement and commitment to data mining looking at the problems I face every day… ok, well, every other day anyway. It's funny isn't it... when somebody's excited about something it's contagious. They get you excited about it too, and I'm psyched about data mining right now.

But hey guys, don't take my word for it. Here are Donald's exact words to me about his move.

I can't see myself as blog-worthy, but certainly I can tell you what I'm up to and why.

My new role will be Principal Program Manager for the SQL Server Data Mining team. It's not really an up or down move. There's just so much fun to be had with customers and partners where the rubber hits the road. I asked for the move, and it's giving me a thrill to do this.

My motivation really goes back to why I am in the BI world at all. BI enables people to build and test their hypotheses against data of a volume and complexity that otherwise they would find difficult to grasp. Data integration is needed to do that, and so it was a great thing to work at that end of the process. But 6 years ago I actually joined MS to work on Analysis Services, because it was the analytic power that appealed to me.