Recent Posts by Sherry LaMonica

This guest post from Matt Fritz, Data Scientist, demonstrates a method for imputing missing values in data using Embedded R Execution with Oracle R Enterprise.Missing data is a common issue among analyses and is mitigated by imputation. Several techniques handle this process within Oracle R Enterprise; however, some bias the data or generate outputs as data objects that are less accessible than others. This post illustrates ways to effectively impute data while specifying the...

Programming languages give developers the opportunity to write reusable functions and to bundle those functions into logical deployable entities. In R, these are called packages. R has thousands of such packages provided by an almost equally large group of third-party contributors. To allow others to benefit from these packages, users can share packages on the CRAN system for use by the vast R development community worldwide. R's package system along with the CRAN framework...

When beginning to use Oracle R Enterprise, users quickly grasp the techniques and benefits of using embedded R to run scripts in database-side R engines, and gain a solid sense of the available functions for executing R scripts through Oracle Database. However, various embedded R functions are closely related, and a few tips can help in learning which functions are most appropriate for the problem you wish to solve. In this post, we'll demonstrate best practices for two of...

We've recently announced that Oracle R Enterprise 1.4 is available on all platforms. To upgrade Oracle R Enterprise to the latest version:   1. *Install the version of R that is required for the new version of Oracle R Enterprise.          See the Oracle R Enterprise supported platforms matrix for the latest requirements.   2. Update Oracle R Enterprise Server on the database server by running the install.sh script          and follow the prompts for the upgrade path.  3....

We’re pleased to announce that Oracle R Enterprise (ORE) 1.4 is now available for download on all supported platforms. In addition to numerous bug fixes, ORE 1.4 introduces an enhanced high performance computing infrastructure, new and enhanced parallel distributed predictive algorithms for both scalability and performance, added support for production deployment, and compatibility with the latest R versions.  These updates enable IT administrators to easily migrate the...

Oracle R Distribution, Oracle's distribution of Open Source R, improves performance by dynamically linking to optimized, multi-threaded BLAS libraries. Unlike open source R, Oracle R Distribution uses all available cores and processors when dynamically linked against optimized BLAS, resulting in increased performance. Thus, the more cores available to Oracle R Distribution, the higher performance for many operations. How is this possible?  Standard R's internal BLAS library wa...

Oracle R Enterprise uses external procedures in Oracle Database to support embedded R execution. An external procedure, or extproc, is a procedure stored in a shared library that is called to perform special-purpose processing.  When ORE invokes an external procedure, Oracle Database starts an extproc agent and passes instructions to the agent for executing the procedure. The agent loads an ORE shared library or DLL, runs the external procedure in the database, and passes...

We are excited to introduce support for Oracle R Distribution 3.0.1 on Windows 64-bit versions. Previous releases are available on Solaris x86, Solaris SPARC, AIX and Linux 64-bit platforms. Oracle R Distribution (ORD) continues to support these platforms and now expands support to Windows 64-bit platforms. ORD is Oracle's free distribution of the open source R environment that adds support for dynamically loading the Intel Math Kernel Library (MKL) installed onyour system....

Oracle R Enterprise is commonly used to apply parallel resources to R computations in Oracle's Exadata Database Machine, To take advantage of Exadata's massively parallel grid infrastructure, Oracle R Distribution and the Oracle R Enterprise server components must be installed on each node. We've now streamlined the installation of Oracle R on Exadata, allowing users to get up and running quickly. This is where Exadata's distributed command line interface utility (DCLI) comes...