Stacia Varga has a follow-up to her Gentle Introduction to Data Analytics:
Q: How is data analytics on SAS different from R support for SQL2016?
A: I’ve not used SAS (although I did go to their campus to teach MDX to their engineers once upon a time… beautiful campus!), so I can’t say with any specificity. SAS also has multiple products so it would be difficult to describe differences. In general – and please understand there may be something new in SAS that I don’t know about – I think the difference is that R in SQL 2016 allows you to run functions on data inside the database, thereby leveraging database resources and also server resources for parallelization. I’d love to get input from readers to expand on this topic.
I can confirm that SAS has a beautiful campus.