[R-sig-Geo] [R-sig-DB] [R] Connecting to PostgreSQL/PostGIS from R (rgdal?)

[David James]

Dirk,

I agree that it would be worthwhile to re-visit what the DBI should
provide, and I
fully agree that R/S-Plus compatibility should not be a goal.   Let me
remind you
that the DBI at the time it was defined more than 5 years ago was not meant
to be a complete specification --  it  identified many features that
were yet to be formalized into the API (prepared statements, stored
procedures, asynchronous communications, transcations, etc.).   Some
of these features were later
added as extensions to packages (e.g., prepared statements in RSQLite by
Seth Falcon  and in ROracle by me) but it would be better to ensure a
common interface for these and other new features.

In terms of data mappings, date/time types are valid concerns, but so are
unsigned ints and longs, BLOBS, fixed decimals, money, points, etc.

Extending the feature set at this point seems to me like a good idea.

Regards,

--
David

On 6/2/07, Dirk Eddelbuettel <edd at debian.org> wrote:
>
> Brian,
>
> On 2 June 2007 at 19:08, Prof Brian Ripley wrote:
> | There are quite a few 'db API' features in RODBC that are not in DBI.
>
> Random idea of the day: Would it be wortwhile to re-think what the DBI API
> should cover?
>
> These days, it may matter less to be R and S-Plus compatible [1] but e.g. to
> me it matters whether I get niceties like POSIXct times in and out of
> databases intact, and that doesn't seem be a concern per se for DBI.
>
> A unified DBI interface is still the right idea, but I'd like to push the
> feature set further. But then I know little about the gory details so feel
> free to correct me.
>
> Regards, Dirk
>
> [1] (or, given who accrues benefits from this, we could make it Insightful's
> concern to catch up)
>
> --
> Hell, there are no rules here - we're trying to accomplish something.
>                                                   -- Thomas A. Edison
>
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