r-server-slideMicrosoft today announced version 9.0 of its R Server, a product designed for data scientists working with large sets of information. The new software was one of several announcements the company made today touching on data analytics, cloud administration and databases.

R is a specialized programming language “designed by data scientists for data scientists,” said David Smith, principal program manager for Microsoft’s R community, during a presentation this morning. R Server is software for analyzing Big Data in the cloud or on premises, whether inside or outside of the Microsoft SQL Server database.

The new version converts R-language models and scripts into web services with a single line of code, directly from an integrated development environment, Microsoft said. It allows training machine-learning models in one environment and deploying them in another, whether on-premises or in the cloud.

Microsoft also announced the private preview of a “cloud console” for its Azure cloud-computing service that it said in a blog post combines a graphical user interface, for simplicity, with a command-line interface, for power. The Azure Cloud Console allows working from the command line while simultaneously viewing cloud resources in the GUI.

The console automatically authenticates command-line tools from the developer’s web login and comes with all Azure command-line tools and relevant command-line utilities pre-installed. Interested developers can volunteer for the trial here.

And Azure offered new choices of price and performance for its SQL Database elastic pools, which it said lower the starting price for pools and the effective cost per database and reduce price jumps among pool sizes. Azure is offering larger sizes for basic, standard and premium pools. SQL Database elastic pools are intended to provide a simple, cost-effective way to manager the performance of multiple databases with unpredictable use patterns.

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