Visualize SQL Server Data using R Data

Science Deep Dive

SQL Server 2016 and later

Updated: September 30, 2016

Applies To: SQL Server 2016
The enhanced packages in R Services InDatabase include multiple functions that have been optimized for scalability and
parallel processing. Typically these functions are prefixed with rx or Rx.
For this walkthrough, you will use the rxHistogram function to view the distribution of values in the creditLine column by gender.

Visualize Data using rxHistogram and rxCube

1. Use the following R code to call the rxHistogram function and pass a formula and data source. You can run this locally at
first, to see the expected results, and how long it takes.
R
rxHistogram(~creditLine|gender,data=sqlFraudDS,histType="Percent")

Internally, rxHistogram calls the rxCube function, which is included in the RevoScaleR package. The rxCube function
outputs a single list or data frame containing one column for each variable specified in the formula, plus a counts
column.
2. Now, set the compute context to the remote SQL Server computer and run the rxHistogram again.
R
rxSetComputeContext(sqlCompute)

3. The results are exactly the same, since you're using the same data source; however, the computations are performed on
the SQL Server computer. The results are then returned to your local workstation for plotting.

4. You can also call the rxCube function and pass the results to an R plotting functions. For example, the following example
uses rxCube to compute the mean of fraudRisk for every combination of numTrans and numIntlTrans:
R
cube1<rxCube(fraudRisk~F(numTrans):F(numIntlTrans),data=sqlFraudDS)

To specify the groups used to compute group means, use the F() notation. In this example,
F(numTrans):F(numIntlTrans) indicates that the integers in the variables numTrans and numIntlTrans should be
treated as categorical variables, with a level for each integer value.
Because the low and high levels were already added to the data source sqlFraudDS using the colInfo parameter, the
levels will automatically be used in the histogram.
5. The return value of rxCube is by default an rxCube object, which represents a crosstabulation. However, you can use the
rxResultsDF function to convert the results into a data frame that can easily be used in one of Rs standard plotting
functions.
R
cubePlot<rxResultsDF(cube1)

Tip

Note that the rxCube function includes an optional argument, returnDataFrame = TRUE, that you could use to convert
the results to a data frame directly. For example:
print(rxCube(fraudRisk~F(numTrans):F(numIntlTrans),data=sqlFraudDS,returnDataFrame=TRUE))

However, the output of rxResultsDF is much cleaner and preserves the names of the source columns.
6. Finally, run the following code to create a heat map using the levelplot function from the lattice package included with all
R distributions.
R
levelplot(fraudRisk~numTrans*numIntlTrans,data=cubePlot)

Results

From even this quick analysis, you can see that the risk of fraud increases with both the number of transactions and the number
of international transactions.
For more information about the rxCube function and crosstabs in general, see Data Summaries.

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See Also

Data Science Deep Dive: Using the RevoScaleR Packages

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