[R-pkgs] RODBC 1.2-6 on CRAN, future directions

[Prof Brian Ripley]

Version 1.2.6 of RODBC is now on CRAN.  This has a number of bug fixes and many 
workarounds for ODBC driver quirks--I've set up further testbeds for SQL Server 
2008, Oracle and DB2.

More visibly, the documentation has been expanded in several ways, in 
particular in collecting together advice on using 'schemas' and 'catalogs' in 
the ?RODBC overview.

There is also a test suite which although mainly useful for the maintainer 
provides some more detailed examples of working with the quirks of various 
backends (and has examples for Oracle's own Windows ODBC driver). 
Contributions of adaptations of those examples to other drivers would be 
welcome (especially for Sybase and other ODBC drivers for Oracle).

In the next version much of the documentation will be moved from the help pages 
to a package manual: a draft of that manual appropriate to RODBC 1.2-6 can be 
found at http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/pub/bdr/RODBC-manual.pdf

Other planned changes are speed-ups for Oracle (currently 4x on the test 
suite), more support for schemas (that in 1.2-6 is just a first step, but the 
behaviour of the ODBC drivers is remarkably inconsistent) and support for R's 
'raw' type.

-- 
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