After reading David Smith’s on the price of Oracle R Enterprise (actually free, but it requires Oracle Data Mining at $23K/core as pointed out by Joshua Ulrich) I went to Oracle’s site to see what was all about. Oracle has a very interesting concept of why we use R:
Statisticians and data analysts like R because they typically don’t know SQL and are not familiar with database tasks. R allows them to remain highly productive.
Pardon? It sounds like if we only knew SQL and database tasks we would not need statistical software. File for future reference.