While this is a good concept in theory, I'd be skeptical about building on top of such a system. The primary reason is the slowness of R. I built heavy duty data mining systems using a stack of kdb/q and R. In my experience, R, when used for simple clustering algorithms like k-means and k-medoids slowed down my system by nearly 70 times. This is despite running parallelized versions of these algorithms (by means of the SPRINT R package) using mpiexec.<p>IMO, there is a very big gap in this space. There is an urgent need for high performant data inference languages. MATLAB is decent, but is still clunky for my taste. Plus, I prefer the simplicity of a file mapped column oriented database like the one offered by kdb. As KDB is too expensive for me right now, I'm considering building on top of the excellent J language/JDB database stack for my big data needs.