Advanced Analytics is becoming a norm now. Every organization wants to use the power of advanced analytics to predict the future outcome and take proactive corrective measures to remain competitive and win over its competitors. Some of the scenarios where predictive analysis can help to find future outcomes are:
Which stocks should we target as part of our portfolio management? Did some stocks show haphazard behavior? Which factors are impacting the stock gains the most? How and why are users of e-commerce platforms, online games, and web applications behaving in a particular way? How do we optimize the routing of our fleet of vehicles based on weather and traffic patterns? How do we better predict future outcomes based on an identified pattern, like predicting the remaining useful life of the machine or time to failure for a machine, etc.Some of the examples in different industries where predictive analysis is playing or can play crucial roles are:
Marketing: Clickstream Analytics, Mix and Price Optimization, etc. CRM: Campaign Optimization Digital Media and Advertisement: Recommendation Engines, Ad Placement, etc. Social Media: Sentiment Analysis Retail: Customer Churn, Purchase Prediction Insurance: Fraud Waste and Abuse, Usage Based Insurance, etc. Manufacturing: Predictive Maintenance, Demand Forecasting, etc. Operations: Supply Chain Optimization Finance: Credit Risk Analysis, Econometric Market Prediction, etc. Life Sciences: Pharmacogenomics Healthcare: Outcome Prediction Health Insurance: Fraud Detection Transportation: Routing optimization, Asset Utilization, etc.It’s now becoming necessary for every organization to exploit the data that they have (or in some cases external data) and predict future outcomes, to remain competitive by offering their customers what they want, when they want and where they want. Looking at this potential, SQL Server 2016 brings native support doing advance analytics in the database itself using R Services.
In this article we will learn what R is, what on-premise advance analytics options from Microsoft are and how to get started using R Services with SQL Server 2016.
What is R?Related Articles Getting Started with Stretch Database Functionality in SQL Server 2016 Part 1 Getting Started with Stretch Database Functionality in SQL Server 2016 - Part 2 Row Level Security with SQL Server 2016: Part 1 Allow Access to Only a Subset of Rows Using Row Level Security Row Level Security with SQL Server 2016: Part 2 - Blocking Updates at the Row Level Altering an Existing Table to Support Temporal Data Getting Started with JSON Support in SQL Server 2016 Part 2 Getting Started with Temporal Table in SQL Server 2016 Part 2 Getting Started with Temporal Table in SQL Server 2016 Part 1
R programming language is an open source, popular and powerful statistical programming language optimized for Statistical Analysis, Machine Learning and Data Science. It has an ever growing, vibrant community of developers and data scientists across businesses, academics, research organization, etc. This community has contributed more than 8000 free pre-built solutions or packages (algorithms, test data and evaluations) to CRAN (Comprehensive R Archive Network), which can be reused and leveraged across your projects easily and quickly. It also includes packages for creating varieties of data visualization for better data exploration.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
R Programming Language
R programming language is one of the fastest growing languages and now ranks at 6 in the IEEE Spectrum survey result published in July 2015.
What Are Advance Analytics Options with R?No matter what platform you are targeting, Microsoft has Advance Analytics offerings for both on-premise as well as cloud platforms. In this article I will be talking about advance analytics offerings available on-premise (though there is some overlap; for example, you can use Microsoft R Server on your on-premise machine as well as in the cloud). To learn about Cortana Intelligence Suite, advance analytics offerings in the cloud from Microsoft, you can refer here.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Figure 1 - Microsoft Advance Analytics Offerings
Microsoft has broadly three advance analytics offerings for on-premises:
Community - Microsoft R Open Free, enhanced and open source R distribution 100% compatible with all R-related software Faster performance with multi-threading Available for windows, Mac and linux Enterprise ready - Microsoft R Server Secure, Scalable and Supported Distribution of R With proprietary components created by Microsoft (Revolution Analytics company acquired by Microsoft) for scaling and better performance For customers who have already have invested in storing data on non-Microsoft platforms like Hadoop, Teradata, and Linux Commercial licensing and enterprise support Enterprise ready - SQL Server 2016 R Services Combining the powers of SQL Server and Microsoft R Server For customers who have data in SQL Server and want to do database advance analytics without moving data elsewhere Commercial licensing and enterprise support Why Use SQL Server R ServicesMicrosoft R Server and SQL Server R Services are both enterprise ready and have been designed to scale and perform, although SQL Server R Services has these additional benefits:
Bring the compute to the data (reduce data movement and duplication). With in-database analytics you can reduce data movement. Everyone can work on the same copy of the data and the data s