This happened back in March. <a href="https://blogs.oracle.com/R/entry/r_execution_in_oracle_database" rel="nofollow">https://blogs.oracle.com/R/entry/r_execution_in_oracle_datab...</a>. It's a desperate attempt to co-opt the Red Hat approach to riches via open source support. Revolution R has been doing pretty well in this game, so Oracle is replicating. The only contribution back to the community so far has been to do a few mild updates to ROracle, the R to Oracle connector.<p>Oracle has basically wrapped up R and made it embedded in the Database. One nice touch is that they have made overloaded versions of most of R's base and stat functions, and let them handle the "ore" dataframes; these overloaded versons are basically wrappers on the "big-data" functions inside the DB.<p>If this is really interesting to you, here are a set of PDFs describing Oracles approach: <a href="http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/database/options/advanced-analytics/r-enterprise/index.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/database/options/advanced-...</a><p>Bad news is: you are limited to Oracle approaches to scale and growth; while there's some to love, there's also lots to hate.<p>I worry that some of this commercialization of R is going to cause trouble, as we start having non-compatible forks of R creating non-replicable analyses. If I build a great model that can only be replicated via some vendor's proprietary approach, then it may be great for my business, but it doesn't move the field forward.
Are data hackers gravitating to R? Given that Oracle and (surprisingly to me) SAS now both support R in their offerings, it seems that at least the enterprise will be taking up more R for analytics.
R is great mostly for the breath of plugins/implementations contributed by the community... much better than its alternative SAS for an infinitely lower price... ($0 vs ~$10k). Not surprised by this move from Oracle as data analytics/mining gets more popular.
For R enthusiasts there is a great blog I follow <a href="http://www.win-vector.com/blog/2012/07/modeling-trick-masked-variables/" rel="nofollow">http://www.win-vector.com/blog/2012/07/modeling-trick-masked...</a>