Thanks, Nick, for the informative article.

I think that for jobs with small data loads, like analyzing SQL Server performance information, using good old-fashioned ODBC to bring the data into a workstation instance of R will remain the better choice for many users. As you mention, the primary value to R on the server is to eliminate the need for send large data volumes over the network.

Some readers might be interested to know that the enterprise R node installed for the R server is built on the message-passing interface (MPI), a tried-and-true high performance computing protocol that has been around for a long time. For computationally intensive tasks it is possible to achieve parallel processing by distributing the R calculations to multiple nodes. Basically, the Revolution R system allows us to add "Big Math" to "Big Data".

Dan Buskirk https://www.linkedin.com/in/sqlanalytics