R Server 9 Adds Machine Learning to Work with Your Data Where It Lives - The New Stack

Built by data scientists, the R programming language has always been a tool for data scientists. But Microsoft's R Server 9, the first full new version of the commercial package of R since Microsoft bought the company that created this distribution, Revolution Analytics, is also now aimed at a new audience -- enterprise customers who have developers and analysts as well as data scientists. That makes working with data from a wider range of sources key because enterprises have such mixed environments these days. R Server already supported Apache Spark 1.6 data processing framework; R Server 9 (which is built on open source R 3.3.2) adds support for Spark 2.0, so you can take advantage of the new options for working with streaming data and the improved memory management subsystem. "You can intermix calls to massively parallel algorithms in R with calls to native Spark, through the SparkR library," explained Bill Jacobs, Principal Program Manager on the R Server team.