Do Be a SAP

In the process of doing some research on a piece suggested, but not yet contracted, on the subject of R and other databases (those without PL/R, which is most of them, sort of), I came across, again, pieces about SAP HANA and R. This one had the following to say:

SAP's long-term ambition with its in-memory technology is for it to serve as both the transactional database and the analytic database, cutting out layers of hardware, related management software and cost while also improving performance. That will cut out Oracle (as well as IBM DB2, Microsoft SQL Server, and Sybase ASE) as the database that runs SAP apps as well as app-related analytics.

The piece was aimed at the friction twixt SAP and Oracle, but the notion that database manipulation belongs with/in the engine sounds kind of familiar. We are not alone.