We're at UseR!2013
It's day two at the useR!2013 conference in Spain and we are seeing a lot of interest in using R for big data analytics. Most notably, we are seeing companies like Oracle and TIBCO devoting a lot of effort and resources in getting their products ready for R (or building a new closed-source R interpreter written in C++ in the case of TIBCO). Both are working on ways to allow analysts to work with large amounts of data in a transparant and efficient way. That means better memory management and less moving around of data between processes.
Renjin has been designed from the ground up to deliver exactly these benefits. These include better garbage collection, deferred computation, multithreading, database and web server integration, etcetera. What's more, you can not only use Renjin from the command line or an IDE, but also call R code from within a Java application or develop R packages in Java instead of C or Fortran.
Got data in memory, in a file, in a database table, or in a cloud-based datastore? To Renjin, it doesn't really matter where your data is located, because these details are covered by an extra layer of abstraction in the interpreter. Renjin will not load data until it is really needed and it will not make unnecessary copies of data objects. This requires no new skills from the R developer or analyst, because the R code remains unchanged.
R has already reached the enterprise, but we believe Renjin will allow you to build a true enterprise-class analytics environment.
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