29 January 2015

About That Other Shoe, Part the Second

I guess I'm not alone. Now, R commercialists are making the argument that M$ should put R in the database. Mind, Joe Conway did it first, so far as I know, with PL/R in PG. He could do that, and all by his lonesome, since Postgres supports user-defined functions in C. And, since R has hooks in C, the "R" language is just nomenclature for yet another C hook. Not all databases, oddly, support C. I suppose it's a security thing, since the bulk of databases these days are C, with I suspect some remnants of assembler (likely in-line). A cwaffty wabbit might be able to subvert the engine through the interface. You'd have to ask the engine writers how big a deal that might be.

What's even more interesting is that the poster left out:
PL/R itself
Netezza (and DB2, sorta) with Revo R
HANA with R (apparently, more than one way)
DB2 with some of SAS (boy howdy that's gotta cost!)

As Sony & Cher (mostly, Cher) put it, "and the beat goes on".

And, just for yucks, have a look at the PG databases that exist by different names. And some tweaks, I'll admit.

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