What’s new in Revolution R Enterprise 7.4

by Bill Jacobs, Director Technical Sales, Microsoft Advanced Analytics

Without missing a beat, the engineers at Revolution Analytics have brought another strong release to users of Revolution R Enterprise (RRE). Just a few weeks after acquisition of Revolution Analytics by Microsoft, RRE 7.4 was released to customers on May 15 adding new capabilities, enhanced performance and security, ann faster and simpler Hadoop editions.

New features in version 7.4 include:

• Addition of Naïve Bayes Classifiers to the ScaleR library of algorithms
• Optional coefficient tracking for stepwise regressions.  Coefficient tracking makes stepwise less of a “black box” by illustrating how model features are selected as the algorithm iterates toward a final reduced model.
• Faster import of wide data sets, faster computation of data summaries, and faster fitting of tree-based models and predictions of decision forests and gradient boosted tree algorithms.
• Support for HDFS file caching on Hadoop that speeds analysis of most files, especially when applying multi-step and iterative algorithms.
• Improved tools for distributing R packages across Cloudera Hadoop clusters.
• An updated edition of R, version 3.1.3.
• Certification of RRE 7.4 on Cloudera CDH 5.2 and 5.3, Hortonworks HDP 2.2 and MapR 4.0.2, along with certification of the much requested CentOS as a supported Linux platform.

For RRE users integrating R with enterprise apps, RRE's included DeployR integration server now includes:

• New R Session Process Controls that provide fine-grained file access controls on Linux.
• Support for external file repositories including git and svn for managing scripts and metadata used by DeployR.
• Strengthened password handling to resist recent attack vectors.
• Updates to the Java, JavaScript and .NET broker frameworks and corresponding client libraries, and,
• A new DeployR command line tool that will grow in capability with subsequent releases.

More broadly, the release of version 7.4 so shortly after acquisition of Revolution by Microsoft underscores our commitment to delivery of an expanding array enterprise-capable R platforms.  It also demonstrates Microsoft’s growing commitment to the growth of advanced analytics facilities that leverage and extend upon open source technologies such as the R language.

Details of the new features in RRE 7.4 can be found in the release notes here. 

Details of improvements to DeployR integration server in RRE 7.4 can be found here.