Gail Shaw reviews R support in SQL Server 2016:
It’s not fast. The above piece of T-SQL took ~4 seconds to execute. This is on an Azure A3 VM. Not a great machine admittedly, but the R code, which just returns the first 6 rows of a built-in data set, ran in under a second on my desktop. This is likely not something you’ll be doing as part of an OLTP process.
I hope this external_script method is temporary. It’s ugly, hard to troubleshoot, and it means I have to write my R somewhere else, probably R Studio, maybe Visual Studio, and move it over once tested and working. I’d much rather see something like
I agree with the sp_execute_external_script mess. It’s the worst of dynamic SQL combined with multiple languages (T-SQL for the stored procedure & R for the contents, but taking care to deal with T-SQL single-quoting). Still, even with these issues, I think this will be a very useful tool for data analysts, particularly when dealing with rather large data sets on warehouse servers with plenty of RAM.