I've read here that Microsoft had acquired evolution Analytics, the company who provide open source distributions of R, alongside commercial “Enterprise” extensions for big data infrastructures.
Since I've decided to broaden my skills set lately by learning R, I believe these are exciting news for the following reasons. The writer of the post, Tony Davis, mentions that it must be to replace/extend SSRS; learning it for a short while, I believe that on top of SSRS, you can use R functionality for acquiring data, modeling, data mining and reporting. Essentially: everything BI, or SSIS, SSAS and SSRS.. Since R reads all the data into RAM, it can also replace/extend the in memory OLAP which exists nowadays in SQL Server 2012 (or the Tabular Model).
Another thing which is important to point out for the SQL developer who's keen to learn R, is the "thinking" of the language. As an SQL developer (especially MS, not necessarily Oracle), we're used to think in "Sets". We don't go row-by-row when we write code, but instead it's table-by-table. It was a type of thinking which is hard to get used to (it was difficult to learn normalization). And then when you need to learn BI, you had to "unlearn" the normalization part, but you're still going by rows. Writing code for regular programming languages (like C, Java, whatever) requires you to go row-by-row, one data (structure) after the other.
In R you have to go row-by-row, while you could still query after a set of data. It requires a completely different type of thinking; if you tell me "data set", I immediately think "SELECT FROM WHERE". It doesn't work this way in R (though you could implement this type of syntax in R). So not only you can have many uses of R, but if might even use R instead of writing a cursor.
So essentially I believe that Microsoft had purchased R in order to extend SQL in many good ways. Either way it makes sense to take the time and learn it!
