Data Science with Microsoft SQL Server 2016 – Free eBook

Foreword

The world around us – every business and nearly every industry – is being transformed by technology. This disruption is driven in part by the intersection of three trends: a massive explosion of data, intelligence from machine learning and advanced analytics, and the economics and agility of cloud computing.

Although databases power nearly every aspect of business today, they were not originally designed with this disruption in mind. Traditional databases were about recording and retrieving transactions such as orders and payments. They were designed to make reliable, secure, mission-critical transactional applications possible at small to medium scale, in on-premises datacenters.

Databases built to get ahead of today's disruptions do very fast analyses of live data in-memory, as transactions are being recorded or queried. They support very low latency advanced analytics and machine learning, such as forecasting and predictive models, on the same data, so that applications can easily embed data-driven intelligence. In this manner, databases can be offered as a fully managed service in the cloud, making it easy to build and deploy intelligent Software as a Service (SaaS) apps.

These databases also provide innovative security features built for a world in which a majority of data is accessible over the Internet. They support 24×7 high-availability, efficient management, and database administration across platforms. They therefore make it possible for mission-critical intelligent applications to be built and managed both in the cloud and on-premises. They are exciting harbingers of a new world of ambient intelligence.

SQL Server 2016 was built for this new world and to help businesses get ahead of today's disruptions. It supports hybrid transactional/analytical processing, advanced analytics and machine learning, mobile BI, data integration, always-encrypted query processing capabilities, and in-memory transactions with persistence. It integrates advanced analytics into the database, providing revolutionary capabilities to build intelligent, high-performance transactional applications.

Imagine a core enterprise application built with a database such as SQL Server. What if you could embed intelligence such as advanced analytics algorithms plus data transformations within the database itself, making every transaction intelligent in real time? That's now possible for the first time with R and machine learning built in to SQL Server 2016.

By combining the performance of SQL Server in-memory Online Transaction Processing (OLTP) technology as well as in-memory columnstores with R and machine learning, applications can achieve extraordinary analytical performance in production, all while taking advantage of the throughput, parallelism, security, reliability, compliance certifications, and manageability of an industrial-strength database engine.

This eBook is the first to truly describe how you can create intelligent applications by using SQL Server and R. It is an exciting document that will empower developers to unleash the strength of data-driven intelligence in their organization.

Joseph Sirosh
Corporate Vice President
Data Group, Microsoft

Download this eBook from Microsoft Virtual Academy today!
https://mva.microsoft.com/ebooks/

Comments

• Anonymous
  October 19, 2016
  Great eBook! Thank you!