Microsoft and R

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  • Great article. There is a good article about this at on SQLMag.com. This is huge news indeed and is all the rage where I work.

    "I cant stress enough the importance of switching from a sequential files mindset to set-based thinking. After you make the switch, you can spend your time tuning and optimizing your queries instead of maintaining lengthy, poor-performing code."

    -- Itzik Ben-Gan 2001

  • Microsoft has a reasonable track record when it comes to buying in technologies and making products from them and/or incorporating them into existing products. I will not predict whether this will be a success (I don't have a reasonable track record when it comes to predictions) but I am sure that they will do, at least, a reasonable job of using it. Success depends on the vagaries of the market.

    Gaz

    -- Stop your grinnin' and drop your linen...they're everywhere!!!

  • R really isn't all that bad. I've used it though not in conjunction with SQL Server yet. If you've done any kind of coding you should be able to pick it up without too much trouble.

    Coursera has a number of statistics courses that involve learning R either as an optional or integral part of the course. Worth checking out and you can't beat free.

    I'm sure there are MOOCs from other online sites on the subject.

    ____________
    Just my $0.02 from over here in the cheap seats of the peanut gallery - please adjust for inflation and/or your local currency.

  • We do a lot of analytics in my environment. Hope some of this makes it into the base sql language.

  • R is good, but R# will be even better.

    "Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the wise. Instead, seek what they sought." - Matsuo Basho

  • Maybe this will be a solid step in making me an armchair epidemiologist, or at least more useful to the people who ask those kinds of questions.

  • Hopefully R# will be to data analytics what C# is to application development, and it won't simply be a curious wallflower like J# and F#.

    "Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the wise. Instead, seek what they sought." - Matsuo Basho

  • Could be a very useful tool in the kit. BI, data visualization, big data analytics etc are very important 'next big things' (though I suppose they are no longer 'next'), and this could, if done well, help MS stay relevant. For stats we use SAS/JMP, for data viz we use Tableau. I don't see ms competing in either space, but they could keep sql server relevant by wrapping in R.

  • Eric M Russell (3/19/2015)


    R is good, but R# will be even better.

    I hope so. No unmanaged code if possible.

  • A couple of other folks mentioned this already, but I can definitely see it: R#

    Think about it; C#, ADO.NET, and R# all working together…

    Beer's Law: Absolutum obsoletum
    "if it works it's out-of-date"

  • Well...

    You have RStudio Server, which is:

    RStudio Server enables you to provide a browser based interface to a version of R running on a remote Linux server, bringing the power and productivity of the RStudio IDE to server-based deployments of R.

    While it's cool to integrate all in one, running complex models on the same instance you are storing data sounds like added pressure where it doesn't need to be? We have been using R to absorb data via flat files where we run complex models on targeted data that in return, spits data back out for SQL Server to absorb. It's separate, contained in their own environments and works pretty well near the data.

    The other thing is that you also have Python and various reporting solutions that integrate R too. I would assume those options, including Python, which can integrate easier into application development would still be the go-to's?

    Other than that, I have yet to learn about R#. Let me check that out.

  • You don't need R if you have Python and it's awesome third party libraries. 😛

    Plus F# isn't a wallflower. F# is the best of the functional first languages. If you are a serious developer and not just a CRUD developer, F# is a pleasure to use. It's a much better language for many domains than C#.

  • chrisn-585491 (3/25/2015)


    Plus F# isn't a wallflower. F# is the best of the functional first languages. If you are a serious developer and not just a CRUD developer, F# is a pleasure to use. It's a much better language for many domains than C#.

    Good ref/tutorial to get started? Something to build good habits?

  • chrisn-585491 (3/25/2015)


    Plus F# isn't a wallflower. F# is the best of the functional first languages. If you are a serious developer and not just a CRUD developer, F# is a pleasure to use.

    True that. I, however, like xslt 3.0 the best. me and, like 6 other people unfortunately.

    "I cant stress enough the importance of switching from a sequential files mindset to set-based thinking. After you make the switch, you can spend your time tuning and optimizing your queries instead of maintaining lengthy, poor-performing code."

    -- Itzik Ben-Gan 2001

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