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.