[R-SIG-Finance] Fwd: [Plr-general] request for input -- good example needed for PGDay lightning-talk

[Christian Gunning]

PLR is a great tool, and Joe's a great developer. If anyone has a good
postgres example sitting on the shelf, i'm sure he'd be happy to hear
of it.

-christian
university of new mexico


---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Joe Conway <mail at joeconway.com>
Date: Wed, Jul 1, 2009 at 8:33 AM
Subject: [Plr-general] request for input -- good example needed for
PGDay lightning-talk
To: PLR MailList <plr-general at pgfoundry.org>


Hi,

On 19 July I'm scheduled to give a 5 minute "lightning talk" at PGDay
in San Jose. My intent is to quickly cover:

- What is R, what is PL/R? (1 slide, 1 minute)
- What are the newest features (1 slide, 1 minute)
       - Added RPostgreSQL compatibility functions
       - Added ability to send serialized R objects to Postgres as
         bytea return values
       - Added ability to convert bytea arguments from Postgres back
         into the original R object
       - Added function to unserialize bytea value in order to restore
         object outside of R (useful for image data)
- Quick pre-staged demo (3 minutes)

For the demo, it would be nice to have a compelling real-life example
(even if the actual data is anonymized in some way). Here is what I
had in mind:

1. Show R script that:
 - uses RPostgreSQL to select data out of PostgreSQL tables
 - does some intermediate calculation to produce a dataframe
 - does a final calculation
 - uses the final data to produce a chart, output as a file
2. Cut-and-paste that R script into a PL/R function, show that it works
  unmodified
3. Show a modified PL/R function (or possibly split into two functions) that:
 - stores the intermediate dataframe in a PostgreSQL table
 - retrieves and recreates the dataframe
 - does the final calculation
 - uses the final data to produce a chart, streamed back to PostgreSQL
  as bytea data
4. Show a PHP page that runs the PL/R and displays the chart

Perhaps ambitious for a 5 minute talk, but what the heck ;-)

The help I'm asking for is the compelling example, complete with data
if possible. I will modify the R script to use PostgreSQL as required.
Does anyone have something they can share?

Thanks,

Joe
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