Opening the SQL Kingdom to the R-ebels

Databases today appear as isolated kingdoms, inaccessible, with a unique culture and strange languages. To benefit from our field, we expect data and analysis to be brought inside these kingdoms. Meanwhile, actual analysis takes place in more flexible, specialised environments such as Python or R. There, the same data management problems reappear, and are solved by re-inventing core database concepts. We must work towards making our hard-earned results more accessible, by supporting (and re-interpreting) their languages, by opening up internals and by allowing seamless transitions between contexts. In our talk, we present our extensive work on bringing a statistical environment (R) together with a analytical data management system (MonetDB).