Blog post author here. SQL Server will be embedding Revolution R Enterprise, which eliminates the slowness and memory constraints of base R for many machine learning and statistical modeling algorithms. It runs parallel (not single-threaded) algorithms in a dedicated sandbox that stream data from SQL Server (and so eliminating RAM constraints). You can see some benchmarks in this white paper http://www.revolutionanalytics.com/sites/default/files/revol... -- for example it can run stepwise linear regression on 5M rows and 100 variables in 14 seconds. (Benchmark scripts at: https://github.com/RevolutionAnalytics/Benchmark )
