[R] Accessing remote data (ftp) over the net

[Marshall Feldman]

Hi,

Is there any way to access data remotely over the Internet? In 
particular, I'm starting a project that will use data from the U.S. 
Bureau of Labor Statistics. The Bureau regularly updates various data 
series and publishes them as a series of flat files that can be 
downloaded via ftp (e.g., cf.  ftp://ftp.bls.gov/pub/time.series/sm/). 
Since some of these files are rather large, I'd like to retrieve 
selected elements by using sql queries. Since the files are often large 
and updated frequently, I'd like to leave them on the server.

I'm thinking of trying something like: R -> RODBC -> MySQL -> query of 
remote flat-file database and keeping the query as a view.

Has anyone been successful doing something like this? Is there a better 
approach?

Thanks.

    Marsh Feldman