Thanks Gentlemen, you were right. Just finished coding it up in non-distributed mode with an external library. It didn't take much time to run at all. Tomorrow I'll scale it up to 16k rows and see how it does. Adding these small number of rows makes absolutely no difference in running time.
Running the regression with 15 data points. Operation #1 finished in 00:00:00.453. Operation #2 finished in 00:00:00.375. Running the regression with 30 data points. Operation #1 finished in 00:00:00.516. Operation #2 finished in 00:00:00.437. Running the regression with 50 data points. Operation #1 finished in 00:00:00.782. Operation #2 finished in 00:00:00.453. Running the regression with 75 data points. Operation #1 finished in 00:00:00.516. Operation #2 finished in 00:00:00.422. Running the regression with 100 data points. Operation #1 finished in 00:00:00.781. Operation #2 finished in 00:00:00.657.
