R has dedicated drivers for every database that I've ever had to use and when that doesn't work, there's the RODBC package. Working with "complicated multi-sit

R has dedicated drivers for every database that I've ever had to use and when that doesn't work, there's the RODBC package. Working with "complicated multi-site relational database[s]" is always a pain in the ass, so I don't see why the burden of simplifying this should fall on R. There are tools (such as RHIPE) to connect R to multi-node Hadoop clusters so that complex statistical algorithms can be written in R and compiled as MapReduce jobs. This type of tool seems like what you wish R had, but we're a ways away from having this for every distributed data source...