Getting Started with using ADLA with R - A Tutorial

Welcome to Getting Started with using ADLA with R tutorial! This tutorial is in the form of short exercises to help Data Scientists get started with using Azure Data Lake Analytics (ADLA) with R for Data Science work. In the tutorial folder above you will find a set of exercises with usql and R scripts with description of the exercise. In the advanced folder under tutorial you will find some more complex examples. Below you will find a brief review of ADLA and USQL. I will also outline steps for deploying R code and to get started using Azure CLI.

Prerequisites for Tutorial

Before you begin this tutorial, you must have the following items:

• An Azure subscription. See Get Azure free trial.
• Azure CLI 2.0. See Install and configure Azure CLI.
• Azure Data Lake Analytics Account and Data Lake Store in your subscription.
• Working knowledge of R.

ADLA review

Azure Data Lake Analytics is the first cloud on-demand analytics job service designed to make big data analytics easy. It has the capability to conduct data processing, advanced analytics, and machine learning modeling with high scalability in a cost-effective way. Using U-SQL, R, Python and .NET, it allows users to run massively parallel data transformation and processing over petabytes of data. A job in ADLA is submitted using a USQL script.

USQL review

U-SQL is the new big data query language of the Azure Data Lake Analytics service from Microsoft. It combines a familiar SQL-like declarative language with the extensibility and programmability provided by C# types and the C# expression language. It includes big data processing concepts such as “schema on reads”, custom processors and reducers on top of a scale-out runtime that can handle any size data. It also provides the ability to query and combine data from a variety of data sources, including Azure Data Lake Storage, Azure Blob Storage, and Azure SQL DB, Azure SQL Data Warehouse, and SQL Server instances running in Azure VMs.

Deploying R Code

R Extensions for U-SQL enable developers to perform massively parallel execution of R code for end to end data science scenarios covering: merging various data files, massively parallel feature engineering, partitioned data model building, scoring and post deployment. In order to deploy R code in we need to install the usqlext in our azure data lake analytics account and within the usql script use the REFERENCE ASSEMBLY statement to enable R extensions for the U-SQL Script. More sample codes for using R can also be found in the following folder in your Data Lake Store:<your_account_address>/usqlext/samples/R.

Azure Data Lake Analytics with R Tutorial Using Jupyter notebook and Azure CLI

You need a Data Lake Analytics account before you can run any jobs. If you don't have one please follow the instructions here to create one (this is assuming you satisfy the prequisite of having an azure subsciption). You will also need to enable “U-SQL Advanced Analytics”, which includes the package for the R extension. In this tutorial we will be using Azure CLI to perform the following tasks: Upload data to Data Lake Store, Submit Data Lake Analytics jobs and Retrieve job results. In the Azure CLI folder above you can find the commands to manage Data Lake Analytics accounts, jobs etc. We will use a jupyter notebook in this tutorial to perform all the tasks above.

Additional Resources

For questions, comments and feedback please visit the tutorial page at Cortana Intelligence Gallery and use the comment section at the bottom.