The R language is an open source project run by a very large community of “clever” statisticians who have created to date over 2,500 plug-ins for analyzing different data sets tuned by industry and data type. More recently, Oracle has jumped into the picture by creating an analytical product that bridges the hard work of R across to their flagship 11g R2 database product.
R is Ready for Big Data: Take the Open Road to Statistical Analysis
By Timothy Prickett Morgan
Statistical analysis has been around since mainframes were introduced to academia and corporations back in the 1960s.
But the great diversity of telemetry collected by systems today, the need to sift through it for insight and the growing popularity of open-source alternatives is transforming the R programming language for statistical analysis and visualisation. Its new nickname is Red Hat for stats…
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/06/03/big_data_r_statistical_analysis/
In the Oracle implementation of R, there is some integration that allows the R console to work with Hadoop distributed file systems and NoSQL databases, both of which are also core components of the world of “Big Data”
