[R] Newbie question about SQL and data sources

[Rex Eastbourne]

Hi,

I just downloaded R, and am wondering about data sources.

Where do people typically get their data for analysis? It seems to me
most people would have their data somehow automatically gathered and
stored in an SQL database (e.g. MySQL), but this seems not to be the
case. Does everyone just use the plain-text tab-separated values
format? If so, how are these tables typically created in the first
place? I store a lot of data automatically in MySQL databases--is
there another good way of aggregating data for statistical analysis
that I might be unaware of?

Thank you,

Rex