Using SQL in R

Things under legendu.net/outdated are outdated technologies that the author does not plan to update any more. Please look for better alternatives.

** Things under legendu.net/outdated are outdated technologies that the author does not plan to update any more. Please look for better alternatives. **

It is suggested that you do not use paste to concatenate SQL queries, but rather have a complete SQL query with special marked variables and then substitute the marked variables with aproprivate values. This makes the SQL code much easier to understand. For example,

q = "
select
    id,
    name
from
    table
where
    id in (${IDs})
"

You can then substitute ${IDs} with the right values.
Some people might against this due to injection attack, but I really do not think this is a problem as database users usually do not have write permissions to public tables. I value readability more here.

JDBC¶

RJDBC is a usable but has some glitches.
You cannot end a SQL statement with a semicolon when using RJDBC. This means that you can send only a single query at a time when using RJDBC, which is not efficient.
RJDBC::dbWriteTable has a bug for Teradata. As an workaround, you can generate SQL statement to insert data by yourself (which is tedious of course).
RJDBC has a bug on schema when checking whether a table exists or not. For exampel, if there is a (non volatile) table p_chdu_t.employees. ‘dbExistsTable(‘employees’)’ returns TRUE but dbExistsTable('p_chdu_t.employees') returns FALSE. This impacts server functions in RJDBC.

ODBC¶

RODBC
teradataR