Oracle Tucks R Stats Language Into Database

Relational database juggernaut Oracle has embedded the R programming language used by more than 2 million statisticians and quants the world over into its 11g relational database. Call it R-acle 11g, Quant Edition.

R, of course, is the open source statistical analysis programming language and is also the name of the runtime engine for that language. R is a bit like the Red Hat for stats, with its main competitors being the closed source analytic tools from SAS Institute and IBM's SPSS unit, among others. The R language was created in 1996 by Ross Ihaka and Robert Gentleman, two stats professors from the University of Auckland in New Zealand.

Nearly two years ago, Revolution Analytics burst on the scene with an effort to commercialize R and its runtime engine, as well as to do proprietary extensions that allowed it to scale across bigger iron than the open source implementation. Since that time, Revolution Analytics has upgraded its Enterprise R so it can read and write data natively in the SAS file format and has parallelized R so it can run on the nodes in a Hadoop cluster, doing statistical analysis on each node's data sets and then reducing them down to a final answer...