Nicely done and interesting article. I had actually considered writing a similar article, but you have beaten me to the punch 🙂

I like your use of Analysis Services as a feature selection tool. This is a good way for someone interested in the concepts to get a jump start. I had a little difficulty interpreting your ER diagram as some of the lines are crossing. Would it be possible to see a picture of a cleaned-up version? David Hay has some excellent guidelines for diagramming conventions here: http://www.essentialstrategies.com/publications/modeling/makingrd.htm

For those asking about performance/appropriateness of the implementation, my experience is that there are some types of predictive analytics processing that benefit greatly (both from performance and code maintenance standpoints) via implementation within SQL. Without seeing the full implementation, I'm not sure if this is such a case, but it's a good idea to think in this direction.

TroyK