From the press release, Oracle gets on R and me too- NoSQL

http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/press/512001

The Oracle Big Data Appliance is a new engineered system that includes an open source distribution of Apache™ Hadoop™, Oracle NoSQL Database, Oracle Data Integrator Application Adapter for Hadoop, Oracle Loader for Hadoop, and an open source distribution of R.

From

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/10/03/oracle_big_data_appliance/

the Big Data Appliance also includes the R programming language, a popular open source statistical-analysis tool. This R engine will integrate with 11g R2, so presumably if you want to do statistical analysis on unstructured data stored in and chewed by Hadoop, you will have to move it to Oracle after the chewing has subsided.

This approach to R-Hadoop integration is different from that announced last week between Revolution Analytics, the so-called Red Hat for stats that is extending and commercializing the R language and its engine, and Cloudera, which sells a commercial Hadoop setup called CDH3 and which was one of the early companies to offer support for Hadoop. Both Revolution Analytics and Cloudera now have Oracle as their competitor, which was no doubt no surprise to either.

In any event, the way they do it, the R engine is put on each node in the Hadoop cluster, and those R engines just see the Hadoop data as a native format that they can do analysis on individually. As statisticians do analyses on data sets, the summary data from all the nodes in the Hadoop cluster is sent back to their R workstations; they have no idea that they are using MapReduce on unstructured data.

Oracle did not supply configuration and pricing information for the Big Data Appliance, and also did not say when it would be for sale or shipping to customers

From

http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/features/feature-oracle-nosql-database-505146.html

A Horizontally Scaled, Key-Value Database for the Enterprise
Oracle NoSQL Database is a commercial grade, general-purpose NoSQL database using a key/value paradigm. It allows you to manage massive quantities of data, cope with changing data formats, and submit simple queries. Complex queries are supported using Hadoop or Oracle Database operating upon Oracle NoSQL Database data.

Oracle NoSQL Database delivers scalable throughput with bounded latency, easy administration, and a simple programming model. It scales horizontally to hundreds of nodes with high availability and transparent load balancing. Customers might choose Oracle NoSQL Database to support Web applications, acquire sensor data, scale authentication services, or support online serves and social media.

and

from

http://siliconangle.com/blog/2011/09/30/oracle-adopting-open-source-r-to-connect-legacy-systems/

Oracle says it will integrate R with its Oracle Database. Other signs from Oracle show the deeper interest in using the statistical framework for integration with Hadoop to potentially speed statistical analysis. This has particular value with analyzing vast amounts of unstructured data, which has overwhelmed organizations, especially over the past year.

and

from

http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/features/features-oracle-r-enterprise-498732.html