Bridging two worlds with RICE: integrating R into the SAP in-memory computing engine

The growing need to use large amounts of data as the basis for sophisticated business analysis conflicts with the current capabilities of statistical software systems as well as the functions provided by most modern databases. We developed two novel approaches towards a solution for this basic conflict, based on the widely-used statistical software package R and the SAP In-Memory Computing Engine (IMCE). We thereby propose an alternative data exchange mechanism with R. Instead of using standard SQL interfaces like JDBC or ODBC we introduced SQL-SHM, a shared memory-based data exchange to incorporate R's vertical data structure. Furthermore, we extended this approach to R-Op introducing R scripts equivalent to native database operations like join or aggregation within the execution plans. With the calculation engine, IMCE provides a framework to model logical execution plans and thereby offers a convenient way to use the full functionality of R via SQL interface. Moreover, this enables us to run R scripts in parallel without the necessity of extending the R interpreter itself.