Interesting info, Barry. Thank you. Sorry about the vagueness. I was concerned about restricting responses by imposing SQL terminology on options I've overlooked. I got .RData and workspace images mixed up. I do not know about the private sector's willingness to read open-source, I was guessing (and hoping to be corrected otherwise) that they might offer importing from common dbm/rdbms.
So RSQlite, and RH2 provide functionality for serverless dbs, and Gabor's sqldf sounds like a sweet way to interact with those. The "NoSQL" (non-relational dbm) projects sound interesting & permit for queries. A case can be made for .RData files to be NoSQL and queryless serverless databases. Perhaps I could use sqldf to pull off queries on .RData files? I thought ODBC was windows specific? Should XML be in the "NoSQL" project list, or is it considered too far along? Sincerely, KeithC. -----Original Message----- From: b.rowling...@googlemail.com [mailto:b.rowling...@googlemail.com] On Behalf Of Barry Rowlingson Sent: Monday, April 19, 2010 12:33 AM To: kMan Cc: r-help@r-project.org Subject: Re: [R] Serverless databases in R On Sun, Apr 18, 2010 at 11:30 PM, kMan <kchambe...@gmail.com> wrote: > It was my understanding that .Rdata files were not very portable, and > do not natively handle queries. Otherwise we'd all just use .RData > files instead of farming the work out to SQL drivers & external > libraries, and colleagues who use, e.g. SAS or SPSS would also have no trouble with them. The "platform" in "cross-platform" to me generally means the operating system on which a program is running - and .Rdata files are perfectly portable between R on Linux, MacOSX, Windows, Solaris etc versions. You didn't mention portability to other statistical packages. You also didn't mention needing SQL, or what you wanted to do with your databases. I figured I'd just mention .Rdata files for completeness! There's also RJDBC and RODBC which can interface to anything with a JDBC or ODBC interface on your system. A .RData file could be considered as a serverless NoSQL database. There's a GSOC proposal to investigate interfaces to NoSQL databases and some info here: http://rwiki.sciviews.org/doku.php?id=developers:projects:gsoc2010:nosql_int erface Isn't it odd that the open-source R community has developed functions for reading in proprietary SAS and SPSS format files, but (AFAIK) the commercial sector doesn't seem to support reading data from open-sourced and open-specced R .Rdata files? Barry ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
