Mastering Data Analysis with R

Loading data from databases

The great advantage of using a dedicated database backend instead of loading data from the disk on demand is that databases provide:

• Faster access to the whole or selected parts of large tables
• Powerful and quick ways to aggregate and filter data before loading it to R
• Infrastructure to store data in a relational, more structured scheme compared to the traditional matrix model of spreadsheets and R objects
• Procedures to join and merge related data
• Concurrent and network access from multiple clients at the same time
• Security policies and limits to access the data
• A scalable and configurable backend to store data

The DBI package provides a database interface, a communication channel between R and various relational database management ...