The SQL Server team recently made a stealth release of a Table Analysis Tools for the Cloud technology preview during the 14th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discover and and Data Mining (KDD08) held in Las Vegas from August 24 to 27, 2008.

The preview takes your data in the form of an Excel worksheet or a .csv file, uploads it to SQL Server 2008 Table Analysis Tools running as a Web service, and adds it to the original or a second worksheet or thin client (browser) window. This description indicates to me that the application is better classified as a traditional Web service or Software as a Service (SaaS) application, rather than a true Cloud Computing candidate.

Here’s a promotional sample of the Excel 2007 add-in displaying a forecast in a chart:

Following are feature descriptions by Microsoft senior software engineer Bogdan Crivat from his Data Mining for the Cloud (or how I spent my summer) post of August 29, 2008:

• Analyze Key Influencers — detects the columns that impact your target column. It presents a report of those valu