Now available is a user interface for Oracle's Data Mining software that is aimed at the many statisticians and data analysts who work with R but don't know SQL or Oracle's database technology well, according to an official issued this week.

R was initially created by Ross Ihaka and Robert Gentleman at the University of Auckland in New Zealand. It now has a sizable community of users, as well as a large number of add-on packages.

The new interface will join existing community-developed R packages for Oracle, including a and a .

Oracle's new interface is entirely external to its software, consisting of function wrappers that pass information between the R environment and the database as PL/SQL queries, according to the blog post.

Although the interface is downloadable at no charge, R users would still have to invest in Oracle products. The vendor's Data Mining database option is listed at US$23,000 for a processor license, plus annual support, according to an .