[R] Time and db precision

[Mikkel Grum]

I have a loop that regularly checks for new data to analyse in my database. In order to facilitate this, the database table has a timestamp column with the time that the data was inserted into the database. Something like this:

while (....) {
    load(timetoken.Rdata)
    df <- sqlQuery(con, paste("SELECT * FROM tabledf WHERE timestamp > ", timetoken, sep = ""))
    analyse(df)
    timetoken <- max(df$timestamp)
    save(timetoken, file = "timetoken.Rdata")
    Sys.sleep(60)
}

Now this used to work fairly well with R and PostgreSQL on Windows, but on Ubuntu, I'm getting a lot of data being pulled up again and again. I suspect what is happening is that R is rounding off to the nearest second, while PostgreSQL is using a much higher level of precision, so that if no new data has come in in the meantime, chances are fairly high (50% ??) that the PostgreSQL timestamp is higher than the version that has been rounded off by R.

Is there any way of recording the timestamp in R exactly as it is in PostgreSQL? Or is there another way of dealing with this??

sessionInfo()
R version 2.11.1 (2010-05-31)
x86_64-pc-linux-gnu

locale:
[1] C

attached base packages:
[1] stats     graphics  grDevices utils     datasets  methods   base

other attached packages:
[1] RODBC_1.3-1

All assistance greatly appreciated.

Mikkel