R and SQL are two completely different beasts; you can use one in conjunction with the other; R is a general programming language with a huge library of mostl

R and SQL are two completely different beasts; you can use one in conjunction with the other; R is a general programming language with a huge library of mostly statistical analysis routines. SQL is a way to get data in/out of a database You might want to use SQL for trivial analyses, and anything more, maybe use R. But you can use SQL from R to get the data.