[R] Serverless databases in R

[Barry Rowlingson]

On Sun, Apr 18, 2010 at 11:30 PM, kMan <kchamberln at gmail.com> wrote:
> It was my understanding that .Rdata files were not very portable, and do not
> natively handle queries. Otherwise we'd all just use .RData files instead of
> farming the work out to SQL drivers & external libraries, and colleagues who
> use, e.g. SAS or SPSS would also have no trouble with them.

 The "platform" in "cross-platform" to me generally means the
operating system on which a program is running - and .Rdata files are
perfectly portable between R on Linux, MacOSX, Windows, Solaris etc
versions. You didn't mention portability to other statistical
packages. You also didn't mention needing SQL, or what you wanted to
do with your databases. I figured I'd just mention .Rdata files for
completeness!

 There's also RJDBC and RODBC which can interface to anything with a
JDBC or ODBC interface on your system.

 A .RData file could be considered as a serverless NoSQL database.
There's a GSOC proposal to investigate interfaces to NoSQL databases
and some info here:

http://rwiki.sciviews.org/doku.php?id=developers:projects:gsoc2010:nosql_interface

 Isn't it odd that the open-source R community has developed functions
for reading in proprietary SAS and SPSS format files, but (AFAIK) the
commercial sector doesn't seem to support reading data from
open-sourced and open-specced R .Rdata files?

Barry