Possible R Server risks

Question

For those who have considered installing or have installed R Server for your company. What are some of the obstacles you have run into? Risks that were considered before installing and how they're being handled? I would like a DBA's perspective on this service.

Answer 1

Hi @M. Graham ,

You can start from this MS document Known issues in SQL Server Machine Learning Services, this article describes known problems or limitations with the Python and R components that are provided in SQL Server Machine Learning Services and SQL Server 2016 R Services.

Hope this could help you.

Best regards,
Cathy

---

If the response is helpful, please click "Accept Answer" and upvote it, thank you.
Note: Please follow the steps in our documentation to enable e-mail notifications if you want to receive the related email notification for this thread.

Answer 2

I still have security concerns. We currently don't have the execute external procedure configuration enabled and don't allow users to have extra privileges on the database. How have you all gotten around this? Any advice would be appreciated.

Answer 3

Hi @M. Graham ,

In a default installation, a Windows firewall rule is used to block all outbound network access from external runtime processes. Firewall rules should be created to prevent the external runtime processes from downloading packages or from making other network calls that could potentially be malicious.

We strongly recommend that you turn on Windows Firewall (or another firewall of your choice) to prevent unrestricted network access by the R or Python runtimes.

Please refer to MS document Firewall configuration for SQL Server Machine Learning Services to get more information.

Best regards,
Cathy

---

If the response is helpful, please click "Accept Answer" and upvote it, thank you.
Note: Please follow the steps in our documentation to enable e-mail notifications if you want to receive the related email notification for this thread.