Oracle announced today that R Enterprise users can now run the popular statistical programming language against large volumes of data directly inside the Oracle Database 11g, including the Exadata Database Machine.

The capability is part of the newly launched Oracle Advanced Analytics for Big Data offering, which bundles Oracle R Enterprise and Oracle Data Mining together for deployment inside the database. The result is the ability to perform complex analytics on significantly larger data volumes than previously possible, said George Lumpkin, Oracle’s Vice President of Product Management for Data Warehousing.

Until now, Oracle R Enterprise and Data Mining users extracted and analyzed only as much sample data as their client machines’ memory could support. Now, users will still interact with the analytics software packages using familiar tools and scripts on their laptops and desktops, but the compute processing and storage will take place at the database layer. Other Oracle database users can then reuse the resulting models as well.

Today’s release comes less than a month after the debut of the Oracle R Connector for Hadoop and Oracle’s Big Data Appliance, which bundles Cloudera’s Hadoop distribution with the Oracle NoSQL database and also includes an open source R distribution. R users can now port analysis easily between Hadoop/NoSQL environments and Oracle 11g, said Vaishnavi Sashikanth, Vice President of Development at Oracle. 

R users exploring unstructured data in Hadoop to determine price changes for insurance policy holders, for example, can easily send the results to the more structured 11g environment to populate downstream applications, she said.

Results from Oracle Advanced Analytics can also be viewed from the Oracle Business Intelligence Foundation Suite and from the Oracle Exalytics In-Memory Machine.