The Microsoft Machine Learning R Services architecture

The architecture of R Server covers many components needed in order for the communication between R IDE or SQL Server and R engine to work properly.

Several components are involved in order to properly execute Transact SQL, R script, and return all the results back to T-SQL:

Figure 7

Launchpad is a new service in SQL Server 2016 that supports execution of external scripts using the external stored procedure from SQL Server. However, in SQL Server 2017, the Python launcher has also been introduced, making Launchpad generally available to the second non-SQL Server language. The idea behind Launchpad is that since the infrastructure is already prepared, the SQL Server should, in the future, support other languages as well, such as JavaScript and C++, opening this service not only to predictive analytics and machine learning...