Wednesday, July 29, 2015

SQL Server 2016 and R-Integration...Part 2

In this blog post I would like to continue the discussion which done in the Part 1 of the SQL Server 2016 and R-Integration. In this blog post I would like to discuss one of the important R Libraries that can speed up the learning process a little and get to analyzing the data more quickly. The library I would like to discuss here is called Rattle. The library rattle can be installed in R by using the following commands. The commands below can be executed within R-Studio. The R-Studio is a more UI friendly to work on R-Commands and scripts.
install.packages("rattle")
rattle()

The install.packages() command in R will install all the files within the rattle library. In R-Studio one would set up the path to pull down the libraries as needed. As you can see the option for Use Internet Explorer Library/Proxy for HTTP is enabled.

Once the package is installed, you can execute the rattle() function with the R-Studio, this will launch a GUI for rattle which has lot of useful options for doing data analysis. In the Rattle GUI as you can see there are lot of options that can be used for source of data, in the example below I am choosing the R-Dataset called who for analysis. Make sure to hit the execute option once you have chosen the data source from the drop down list.

In order to explore the dataset , use the explore tab and choose the summary option and I additionally choose Basics. These 2 options combined provides an quick overview of the dataset who by providing some important statistical data about the data set.

There are a lot more options available in rattle to do much more complex data analysis. As the integration between SQL Server and R continues, I am hoping such utilities are provided by Microsoft so that the data analysis can be more enhanced

Monday, July 27, 2015

Cortana Analytics - Microsoft

In today's world of big data, cloud, mobile paradigm there have been a slew of analytic/dashboard tools out there, trying to get the attention of business and grab market share. One of the tools that I came across and looking forward to getting a deeper dive into the details is the Cortana Analytics suite from Microsoft. Microsoft is coming out with lot of offerings these days that look exciting and interesting. Here is the link that explains why Cortana Analytics from Microsoft.
http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/server-cloud/cortana-analytics-suite/why-cortana-analytics.aspx.
One of the key features that I tam wanting to explore further is the aspect of perceptual intelligence:
Quoting the web site "Interact with customers and stakeholders in new ways and infer intent with vision, face, speech, text and sentiment analysis to customize responses and drive appropriate actions". This would be really interesting to see how things play out here. There are a couple of events I plan to attend to see if there are any used cases related to the topic of perceptual intelligence. Once you go the link above, one can actually see industry specific used cases examples documented on the website. Will post another topic related to Cortana once I get through some presentations.

Thursday, July 23, 2015

Big Data, Column Store, InMemory...

With the increase in data that is being stored and analyzed , the concepts such as Big Data, Column Store and In Memory databases have been in discussion or being used by different organizations. Also there are multiple vendors at play, the one size fits all doesn't seem to be working. Please see this video where in Michael Stonebraker talks about the different concepts such as Column Store, Big Data and In Memory databases. He specifically mentions not to give in to the marketing hype and use proper proof of concepts on site with the data that needs to be analyzed to arrive at the right solution needed for an Organization. Here is the link for the video, it is a bit old but I felt is very relevant in terms of the questions to be asked.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_00H1cgXeWw. Mike specifically talks about how important columnstore is going to be in Data warehouses.

Saturday, July 18, 2015

SQL Server 2016 and R-Integration...Part 1

Earlier I had blogged about SQL Server and R can be connected to perform data analysis. Also in SQL Server 2016 there is supposed to be better R Integration. In today's market Data scientists/Data Wranglers are in great demand since organizations have piles of data and want to make sense of the data, also if data can provide valuable insights. Given these market trends and the push for aligning the business and data more closely it is important to have the analytic skills. In this blog I would like to provide an article which gives a flavor of sql server 2016 and R-Integration. In the link below:
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2015/05/r-in-sql-server.html. The article describes SQL Server program managers Lindsey Allen and Borko Novakovic demonstrated a prototype of running R within SQL Server. For the R-Integration,Microsoft SQL Server has collaborated with http://www.revolutionanalytics.com/products. I hope you find the article and demo provided in the link above useful.