Best of both worlds: relational databases and statistics

Abstract

Statistics software packages and relational database systems possess considerable overlap in the area of data loading, handling, and transformation. However, only databases are mainly optimized towards high performance in this area. In this paper, we present our approach on bringing the best of these two worlds together. We integrate the analytics-optimized database MonetDB and the R environment for statistical computing in a non-obtrusive, transparent and compatible way.