Introducing the free Microsoft R Client

Over the years, we've shared several posts on using the ScaleR package to import, process, visualize and analyze large data sets with R. Until now, you needed to have access to a Microsoft R Server license to take advantage of the package. Now, you can use all of the capabilities of ScaleR free of charge with Microsoft R Client for Windows, which is available for download now.

Microsoft R Client is a free, community-supported, data science tool for high performance analytics. R Client is built on top of Microsoft R Open so you can use any open source R packages to build your analytics. Additionally, R Client introduces the powerful ScaleR technology and its proprietary functions to benefit from parallelization and remote computing.

R Client allows you to work with production data locally using the full set of ScaleR functions, but there are some constraints. On its own, the data to be processed must fit in local memory, and processing is limited up to two threads for ScaleR functions. To benefit from disk scalability, performance and speed, you can push the compute context to a production instance of Microsoft R Server such as SQL Server R Services and R Server for Hadoop.

Here's a short video that explains the capabilities of Microsoft R Client for local data processing, and how you can push computations to a remote Microsoft R Server for even greater power. 

 

If you're new to big-data functions in Microsoft R, a great place to start is the The RevoScaleR Getting Started Guide. If you want to dive deeper, the full documentation set is available on MSDN. To get started with Microsoft R Client, follow the instructions in the installation guide linked below.

MSDN: Install Microsoft R Client on Windows

 

Comments

[Jan Gorecki]

is it open source?

[David Smith]

Micrososoft R Client is built on Microsoft R Open; it and the underlying R engine are open source. The ScaleR package (with the big-data algorithms) is not open source.

[iair kleiman]

Is anyone else having problems with the installation?

I downloaded the installer file 9 989 KB, run it as administrator on Windows 10 64 bits, and I get this pop up and nothing more

What am I doing wrong?

Windows ® Installer. V 5.0.10586.0

msiexec /Option [Optional Parameter]

Install Options

Installs or configures a product
/a
Administrative install - Installs a product on the network
/j [/t ] [/g ]
Advertises a product - m to all users, u to current user

Uninstalls the product
Display Options
/quiet
Quiet mode, no user interaction
/passive
Unattended mode - progress bar only
/q[n|b|r|f]
Sets user interface level
n - No UI
b - Basic UI
r - Reduced UI
f - Full UI (default)
/help
Help information
Restart Options
/norestart
Do not restart after the installation is complete
/promptrestart
Prompts the user for restart if necessary
/forcerestart
Always restart the computer after installation
Logging Options
/l[i|w|e|a|r|u|c|m|o|p|v|x|+|!|*]
i - Status messages
w - Nonfatal warnings
e - All error messages
a - Start up of actions
r - Action-specific records
u - User requests
c - Initial UI parameters
m - Out-of-memory or fatal exit information
o - Out-of-disk-space messages
p - Terminal properties
v - Verbose output
x - Extra debugging information
+ - Append to existing log file
! - Flush each line to the log
* - Log all information, except for v and x options
/log
Equivalent of /l*
Update Options
/update [;Update2.msp]
Applies update(s)
/uninstall [;Update2.msp] /package
Remove update(s) for a product
Repair Options
/f[p|e|c|m|s|o|d|a|u|v]
Repairs a product
p - only if file is missing
o - if file is missing or an older version is installed (default)
e - if file is missing or an equal or older version is installed
d - if file is missing or a different version is installed
c - if file is missing or checksum does not match the calculated value
a - forces all files to be reinstalled
u - all required user-specific registry entries (default)
m - all required computer-specific registry entries (default)
s - all existing shortcuts (default)
v - runs from source and recaches local package
Setting Public Properties
[PROPERTY=PropertyValue]

Consult the Windows ® Installer SDK for additional documentation on the
command line syntax.

Copyright © Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.
Portions of this software are based in part on the work of the Independent JPEG Group.

[logothete]

Guys, what are the restrictions on the developer edition at the Visual Studio Dev Essential's program? Can I use it freely if I don't plan to deploy a specific project on servers? Do you plan to discontinue that program in favor of this?

[Carl Nan]

Microsoft R Server Developer Edition which is hosted in Visual Studio Dev Essentials limits the usage for development and testing only. It is not allowed to access to production data. Function-wise, it doesn't have any limitation.

Microsoft R Client is a free data science tool. You can use it to access and explore with production data. Function-wise, it has some limitations for ScaleR functions: 1) in memory bound 2) up to two threads computing.

[David Smith]

@aiar, not sure what caused your problem but if you ask on the Microsoft R forum and include your setup log (%TEMP%\ RClientSetup_*.log), the team should be able to help you there.

[Karriem O. Lateef]

I have the same issue as David Smith in that I get a Windows Installer box, but nothing actually installs...on Windows 10

[Karriem O. Lateef]

I got it working. I went to the log file which had this:

2016-07-19T01:50:42 INFO Extracting resource %TEMP%\RClientSetup_Cache\RClient.msi
2016-07-19T01:50:42 INFO Reading registry value HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\R Client\ProductCode
2016-07-19T01:50:42 INFO Registry value:
2016-07-19T01:50:42 INFO Installing R Client
2016-07-19T01:50:42 INFO Running command: msiexec /i %TEMP%\RClientSetup_Cache\RClient.msi /log "%TEMP%\RClient_20160718095042.log"
2016-07-19T01:50:47 ERROR Install failed

I then went to that %TEMP%\RClientSetup_Cache directory, and clicked on the RClient.msi file, and it ran and installed...