Installing SQL Server R Services With CTP 3

I’m excited that CTP 3 of SQL Server 2016 is publicly available, in no small part because it is our first look at SQL Server R Services.  In this post, I’m going to walk through installing Don’t-Call-It-SSRS on a machine.

Warning:  Time-Sensitive Material

Hey, so this blog post is written for SQL Server 2016 CTP 3.  If you’re a time traveler from the distant future in which SQL Server 2016 RTM was already released, you might want to double-check that the installation instructions are still valid.  This post went live on November 9th, 2015.

Step 0:  Start Downloading Stuff!

You’d might as well download everything up-front and save yourself some time later.  Here’s a list of what you’ll need:

• SQL Server 2016 CTP 3.  The ISO is ~2.6 GB, so this will take you a while.
• Revolution R Open 3.2.2 for Revolution R Enterprise 7.5.0.  If that direct EXE link fails, go to the installation instructions page and look for Revolution R Open.  This file should be about 56.8 MB.
• Revolution R Enterprise Node SQL 7.5.0, available on the Revolution R Enterprise page.  This is an 81.3 MB download.
• Revolution R Enterprise SQL 7.5.0, also available on the Revolution R Enterprise page.  This is not required; it gives you the Revolution R IDE, in case you don’t want to use RStudio.  If you do want to try it out, the download is 463 MB.

Step 1:  Install SQL Server 2016

My assumption here is that you have at least Next-Next-Nexted the SQL Server installation once in your life.  Feel free to do that, but make sure you check the “Advanced Analytics Extensions” checkbox under Database Engine.

This is the bare minimum you need in order to use SQL Server R Services.  But if you’re playing around on a VM, you may want to grab Reporting Services as well so that you can experience the tight integration between SSRS and Don’t-Call-It-SSRS.

Step 2:  Install RRO/RRE

You downloaded RRO and RRE Node earlier, so take the opportunity to install them now that SQL Server has finished installing.  The installation wizards are quite straightforward and you can Next-Next-Next your way through them with no problem.  On a brand new Windows installation, I needed to get the Visual C++ 2013 and 2008 runtimes.  Take this opportunity to look back at how Microsoft wizards have changed over the past 8 years.

Oh, you can also install the big honkin’ version of RRE if you want, but again, it’s not necessary to install that on the server.

Step 3:  Configure SQL Server

Do your configuration voodoo like you normally do, but add one additional step to your checklist:  turn on external scripts:

EXECUTE sp_configure 'external scripts enabled', 1; 
RECONFIGURE

Now that this is on, we are ready to finish the post-installation process.

Step 4:  Register Your Server

The post-installation instructions will then have you run RegisterRExt.exe:

"%programfiles%\RRO\RRO-3.2.2-for-RRE-7.5.0\R-3.2.2\library\RevoScaleR\rxLibs\x64\RegisterRExt.exe"/install

The post-installation instructions forgot to include those quotation marks; if you leave them out, you’ll probably get an error because your Program Files folder is “C:\Program Files” like almost everybody else in the world.  Oh, and if you took the opportunity to install a named instance of SQL Server, instead of running the above code, run the snippet for a named instance.

Step 5:  Enjoy!

At this point, you now have SQL Server R Services set up on your machine.  We’re going to take a closer look at how to use SQL Server R Services tomorrow.