I think so, at least for my use, but I'm at a large company and I don't see the licensing costs (nor do they directly come out of my budget). It's not to say R

I think so, at least for my use, but I'm at a large company and I don't see the licensing costs (nor do they directly come out of my budget). It's not to say R is bad, it just takes (me) longer to do similar work. Of course, we're also a Teradata shop and being able to run R in-database is awfully tempting - but I doubt we'd save any money at that point (even if its not my budget, still have to justify it), and we'd have a ton of stuff to migrate. And we're not really performance bottlenecked right now. There's a cost tradeoff there, but R has really been awesome in getting really solid statistical and data manipulation software in the hands of individuals and small businesses for free. For instance, I don't have SAS at home - my basement hacking uses R.