What's new !
Sybase RAP version 4.1, provides support for R.
RAPStore lets users invoke R programs running on an R server as if they were SQL functions, using the RAPStore UDF infrastructure. In SQL databases, a user-defined function (UDF) is a mechanism for extending the functionality of the database with custom analytics. RAPStore allows UDFs written in C/C++ to be invoked like any other SQL function. Those UDFs can in turn invoke R programs. This broadens the analytical capabilities of RAPStore in an open, extensible way. RAP users benefit from the rich set of existing statistical packages available within the R community, and can make use of them for application development.
R users can query data in RAPStore using RJDBC. This can be used to push data pre-processing activities into RAPStore where it can often be accomplished much more efficiently. Pre-processing operations, such as data cleansing, filling in missing values, and so on can be written as stored procedure calls within RAPStore. This enables only the relevant results to be downloaded to the analyst workstation, as opposed to downloading all the data from the database. Additionally, if there are many R users that need to access data for their analysis, common preprocessing functions can be shared in RAPStore, ensuring that data cleansing and pre-processing operations are performed consistently for all users. Finally, RAPStore allows many terabytes of data to be stored efficiently with significant compression (50-70%), providing R users with large amounts of data to effectively backtest their algorithms.
Click here for code samples showing RAP/R integration and for the RAP/R whitepaper, click-here.
