[R-pkgs] RODBC 1.1-1

[Prof Brian Ripley]

The first non-maintenance update of RODBC since January 2003 is now on 
CRAN and will soon propagate to mirrors.  From the ChangeLog:

        * Select the decimal point from Sys.localeconv.

        * Add an external reference and finalizer so open channels get
          closed at the end of the session or when there is no R object
          referring to them.

        * There is no longer a restriction to 16 channels.

        * Add NAMESPACE.

        * odbcConnect{Access,Dbase,Excel} allow a missing file name
          (and will bring up a dialog box to search for it).

        * odbcGetInfo returns more information in a 8-element character
          vector (based on an idea of Matthew Dowle).

        * The C code calls SQLExecuteDirect rather than SQLExecute and
          does not call SQLCloseCursor, based on a problem report from
          Matthew Dowle using MS SQLServer.  Repeated calls to
          sqlGetResults now work.

        * New function sqlFetchMore.

        * Table names in Access with embedded spaces are mapped to the
          [name space] form which Access requires.

        * Table creation no longer removes _ from column names.

        * New functions get/setSqlTypeInfo and the typeInfo argument to
          sqlSave allow users to specify the mapping from R types to DBMS
          datatypes.  sqlSave also allows the specification of DBMS
          datatypes by column.

        * It is now possible to write more than 255 chars to a field with
          sqlSave and sqlUpdate.

        * Dates and timestamps are now read as 'Date' and 'POSIXct'
          columns by sqlGetResults (unless as.is = TRUE for the column).

I have been able to test SQL Server reasonably extensively this time 
around, as well as MySQL, PostgreSQL, Access, Excel and SQLite.

-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272866 (PA)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595