DBAs spend time dealing with SQL Server performance, capacity, monitoring, troubleshooting, provisioning, etcetera; I’ve previously mentioned that R is a powerful, open-source language with a great ecosystem of libraries for analysis and visualisation, so it’s no surprise that I think mixing SQL Server and R Markdown for reporting goes together like a Vegemite and cheese sandwich…lunch perfection!
Here’s a couple of real-world examples of how I’ve used R Markdown connected to SQL Server (for a recap of how to do this from a technical perspective, see my earlier blog post “Connecting to a SQL Server database from R Markdown”):
This is a neat approach to visualizing database backup times as a process control chart.