IBM, Cloudera join RStudio to create R interface to Apache Spark

The focus here is on data: from R tips to desktop tools to taking a hard look at data claims. R users can now use the popular dplyr package to tap into Apache Spark big data. The new sparklyr package is a native dplyr interface to Spark, according to RStudio. After installing the package, users can "interactively manipulate Spark data using both dplyr and SQL (via DBI), according to an RStudio blog post, as well as "filter and aggregate Spark data sets then bring them into R for analysis and visualization." There is also access to Spark distributed machine-learning algorithms.