Absolutely false. I'm a statistician who specializes in large data. I'm guessing you aren't dealing with large data, even though you think you are. That aside, you prove my point -- for R to work at all with large data, you'll need to add on all sorts of packages like SNOW or foreach or multicore and spend hours reading documentation (and pray it works). Fire up a database package like Oracle or SQL Server or a statistical processing program like SAS, and you'll need no extras. Better yet, you only need to know SQL to obtain basic queries, which it sounds like the OP is after. viktor_k67 has got the right idea.