While my last post extolled the virtues of SQL Server Standard Edition, this week while doing some client testing with Microsoft, I learned about another key standard edition feature. The new SQL Server R services is supported in standard edition of SQL Server 2016. While you won’t get access to some of the cool functions from Revolution Analytics and in-line parallelism (there is a @parallel=1 in sp_execute_external_script that automatically parallelizes your operations), you can still use all of the Open Source R functions, and build out your own parallelism (just multiple calls of your procedure).
This is a huge benefit for those of you are who are doing statistical analysis of data and want to integrate with SQL Server. Stay tuned here for more detail for how DBAs can use R to analyze performance.
