Microsoft R-Open (MRO) is Microsoft’s distribution of R. Azure SQL and SQL Server products and services will begin to phase out the use of MRO in favor of the CRAN distribution of R. The next release of SQL Server will use the CRAN distribution of R for SQL ML Services. Similarly, Azure SQL Managed Instance, SparkR, and sparklyr in SQL Server Big Data Clusters will also be upgraded to the CRAN distribution of R in a future update.
Version 4.0.2 will be the last release of the MRO runtime. Customers using MRO as their R runtime should transition to the CRAN distribution of R. It is important to note that the CRAN Time Machine will be unaffected by this change and will continue to be supported.
Microsoft R and Python packages will be released as open-source and supported on the CRAN distribution of R. As part of the acquisition of Revolution Analytics, Microsoft acquired proprietary technology for running models with unprecedented performance and scalability. We will open source the RevoScaleR and revoscalepy packages, making them freely available under the MIT license. The Python packages will be made available in PyPi while the R packages will be ported from MRO to the CRAN distribution of R. Packages will be maintained by Microsoft as new versions of Python and the CRAN R runtime are released. To simplify the installation and creation of development environments, these R packages will be built and published into the Azure R universe.
https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/sqlserver/2021/06/30/looking-to-the-future-for-r-in-azure-sql-and-sql-server/?WT.mc_id=aiml-0000-davidsmi
Microsoft R-Open (MRO) will be phased out in favor of the official CRAN distribution
