Hi. One thing you might also want to consider is the RDBI/RdbiPgSQL suite
at GRASS found at grass.itc.it/statsgrass/r_and_dbms.html. These are
PostgreSQL drivers. For MySQL, just use the DBI and RMySQL found on CRAN at
cran.at.r-project.org/src/contrib/PACKAGES.html. I primarily run R
on Win32, FreeBSD and Mac OSX. The DBI PostgreSQL drivers work impressively
well on the FreeBSD/Mac OSX platforms, (which are "kissing cousins",
per
se.) As Prof Ripley alluded to, using Java sounds hard just to retrieve a
dataframe and there are, IMHO, far easier ways to pull data.
On Win32, RODBC works well, however I found absolutely no joy on FreeBSD and
PostgreSQL. I have used RODBC on Win32 to pull MS SQL, MS Access, Teradata,
etc. predicated that there are appropriately installed ODBC drivers for them
on your PC. FYI, I work for a really large bank and my group is basically a
"SAS shop" as well. While SAS is great at some things, I argue R is
better
for others. So, while as not to start a thread on R vs. SAS merits, I wish
you luck integrating R in your work/workplace. It's a great/powerful
analysis language/package whose adoption I hope continues to expand.
Charles
-----Original Message-----
Thanks for the reply - thru R i have large data sets in oracle, mssql,
postgres and we have jdbc drivers for all of them - most of these systems
are on UNIX/LINUX and ODBC is not used - we use JDBC to hit the DB's usually
in java applications we have. other than that we are a large SAS shop and i
am trying to find an alternative to SAS, i think R has a good chance.
For R and SQL - i assume using the wrapper below is the easiest way to hit
databases via SQL - are there any other ways i am missing? or is JDBC route
the easiest when ODBC is not available?
not sure if R contains some standard database routines that i am not seeing?
also
does R have some good data manipulations function - if so, could you point
me in the right direction (similiar to DATA steps in SAS)
-thx!
[[alternative HTML version deleted]]