R Server

In the beginning of this year Microsoft launched its R server. It is based on the products from Revolution Analytics they bought last year. They basically have two versions of the product:

• A commercial version called Microsoft R Server (MRS) and an open source one called Microsoft R Open (MRO). The last one is part of the Microsoft R Application Network or MRAN. You can find more information here.

• There is also the SQL Server R Services that will allow you to use R in a SQLServer 2016 environment. It uses the same runtime as the MRS.

This is a major step for Microsoft supporting the standard in statistical programming. We hope to see soon support for R in products such as Visual Studio!

From the website:

By using and extending open source R, Microsoft R Server is fully compatible with R scripts, functions and CRAN packages, to analyze data at enterprise scale. We also address the in-memory limitations of open source R by adding parallel and chunked processing of data in Microsoft R Server, enabling users to run analytics on data much bigger than what fits in main memoryâ

Certainly the last sentences is worth while noting. We will do some extensive tests and see if this hold, come back to see our results!

Link