Friday, August 9, 2013

Using R to Unlock the Value of Big Data


Using R to Unlock the Value of Big Data, by Tom Plunkett, Mark Hornick

4 stars

This is a brief (approximately 80 pages) introduction targeted at users with an intermediate-level exposure of R and who want to get a quick look at working with R with Oracle's products. Strictly speaking, this is not an introduction to R, nor is this an R tutorial. It is, very specifically, an introduction to R as it integrates with and relates to the Oracle Database, the Oracle R Distribution, and the Oracle R Connector for Hadoop. The main chapters are "Using Oracle R Enterprise" and "Oracle R Connector for Hadoop", which have sixteen and seventeen examples, respectively, to help you get started.



Oracle provides "Oracle R Enterprise" (ORE), that "overloads R functions that normally operate on data.frames and pushes down their execution to Oracle Database, where transformations and statistical computations are performed on database tables. ORE introduces ore.frame objects that serve as proxies for database tables and views."

Connected with ORE is ROracle, which is "an open source R package now maintained by Oracle." "Oracle R Enterprise uses ROracle for connectivity between R and Oracle Database. ROracle has been re-engineered using the Oracle Call Interface (OCI)"

And finally there is the "Oracle R Connector for Hadoop", which "provides an R interface to a Hadoop cluster, allowing R users to access and manipulate data in Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS), Oracle Database, and the file system."

So, if you are new to R or need to dive deeper into R, then this is not the book for you. If, however, you need to work with R for big data and enterprise applications, or integrate R with the Oracle Database and/or its Data Mining capabilities, then you should take a look at this book.

Disclosure: I am an Oracle employee and work with its business intelligence product group. I have reviewed this book in my personal capacity, and this review does not represent Oracle in any way.

ISBN-10: 0071824383
Print ISBN-13: 9780071824385
E-Book ISBN-13: 9780071826273

Buying information:
Amazon: US | UK | CA | IN, Kindle e-book: US | UK | CA | IN, Indie Books, Powell's, Flipkart

Kindle Excerpt:

© 2013, Abhinav Agarwal (अभिनव अग्रवाल). All rights reserved.