Microsoft allows trying its new SQL Server for Linux

This is a great time to have tools to do data analysis.  Microsoft is now allowing evaluations of its new SQL Server.  This new SQL Server can now be deployed to a Linux OS environment.  This is big news especially for those that have followed this blog through the years.

The new SQL Server version is also carries new analytic tools such as R.  From this Techcrunch announcement

The new version of SQL Server will include improved support for R Services and a number of new machine learning and deep neural networking features.

These are exciting times in deed.  I hope Microsoft continues this path to bringing new tools to the market.

Microsoft releases LightGBM

Microsoft has been really increasing their development of tools in the predictive analytics and machine learning space.  Another such tool they released recently is LightGBM.  From the Github site...

LightGBM is a fast, distributed, high performance gradient boosting (GBDT, GBRT, GBM or MART) framework based on decision tree algorithms, used for ranking, classification and many other machine learning tasks.

Microsoft is definitely increasing their attempts to capitalize on the machine learning and big data movement.  I hope they continue to develop tools such as LightGBM and R with SQL Server.

Revolution R is now Microsoft R

There has been a huge shift in the force.  Can you feel it?  Today Microsoft is announcing that Revolution R is now Microsoft R.  This includes the Open R version as well.  Some notable features of Microsoft Open R.

• Open R 3.2.2 is fully compatible with R 3.2.2
• Microsoft, Mac OS X, and Linux support (wow!)
• Available free to download
• Multi-threaded math libraries
• Enterprise version available (for a price)

This is an interesting shift for Microsoft in the analytics space.  Microsoft is flexing it's server muscles to show that it can play in the data science field as well.  I'm wondering if the industry is going to shift.  We know that IBM, SAS, and Oracle are pushing forward with cloud analytics.  Microsoft is showing a major commitment to partner with the R community.  I think this is a bold and wise move as R has shown nothing but growth the last few years.