Recent trends indicate we are bridging the gap between the world of Data Science and Enterprise Software Development. Last year Oracle introduced Oracle R Enterprise and Microsoft has announced that their SQL Server 2016 release will have R integrated. The good news is that R developers will soon be able to tap data sources that have most often been difficult to connect to without working with a developer to extract and transform the data. The bad news is that it will not be cheap to embrace these new commercial R options.

To honor the open source community which has given me so much over years, I have decided to release a small utility under the GNU General Public License which I call OLAPRGateway. OLAPRGateway is a Windows console application which provides a gateway that any R development environment running on the same network can utilize to query Microsoft SQL Server, SQL Azure, SQL Server Analytic Services as well as custom remote .NET code libraries.

The package contains binaries and the full source code, including R library packages for Ubuntu, Windows and Mac OS X. Unfortunately the packages must be manually installed. Due to the strict criteria CRAN has regarding libraries that communicate with outside processes, I have chosen to keep this release outside their repository. Detailed install instructions for each OS environment are included.

OLAPRGateway is available now on GitHub at the link below

https://github.com/jdeats76/OLAPRGateway