After reading the title I was sure there was something about R in the comments. You can program R in Spark you can now program in R http://blog.revolutionanaly

After reading the title I was sure there was something about R in the comments. You can program R in Spark you can now program in R http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2015/01/a-first-look-at-spark.html http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2015/01/a-first-look-at-... Now you can work directly with SQL Server as announced this week by MS. http://www.computerworld.com/article/2923214/big-data/sql-server-2016-to-include-r.html http://www.computerworld.com/article/2923214/big-data/sql-se... I have had a ton of arguments about R's "biggest weakness" being that it uses RAM. I haven't once in the almost 3 years of working in R that I ran into this road block, but I am sure others have. Which there are several good distributed choices that will keep getting better and better. Using RAM instead of Distributed is better in R as well as really any other language in terms of complexity and flexibility.