Faheem Mitha wrote:
Hi Hans,
Thanks for the reply.
On Tue, 18 Nov 2008, Hans Werner Borchers wrote:
Faheem Mitha <faheem <at> email.unc.edu> writes:
Hi,
Does anyone know of an R ORM (Object Relational Mapper)? I'm thinking of
something similar to sqlalchemy (http://www.sqlalchemy.org/).
Alternatively or additionally, can people offer suggestions about
managing
relational databases from R. I'm currently using postgresql, but would
like a flexible solution that works across different databases, hence
the
enquiry about ORMs.
Hi Faheem,
I am wondering, what kind of objects or classes you would like to
apply the object relational mapper to. S4 classes? -- I doubt that
very much.
Yes. R classes. As long as they support the object oriented paradigm, it
doesn't matter too much to me what kind exactly. ORMs map between
classes and db tables.
The attraction of an ORM is high level abstraction capabilities as well
as a helping of syntactic sugar.
The only reasonable structure for which one could use a mapper in R is
the data frame. All R database packages provide support for getting
and sending data in data frames to and from databases. Admittedly,
this is not what someone from the Python community would accept as an
"object relational mapper", but may be sufficient given that there is
only this one class concerned.
You mean eg http://rpgsql.sourceforge.net/ can be used to read and write
from a postgresql db, and there are similar packages for mysql etc.?
The only way I know to become a somewhat independent from specific
databases is to turn to RODBC (Windows or Linux, you didn't say that).
The only way I know is to use standard SQL, and avoid product specific
extensions in all your code that uses the database. Even that is not
perfect, but it is a pretty good start. I don't think RODBC really
solves this problem for you. It does allow you to talk to different
products, but so do the various DBI drivers. But in either case, if you
use product specific extensions then you will tie yourself to the
product (which is one reason vendors like to add such useful
extensions). I read the initial remark to be about porting the database
itself. In my limited experience this may be a small part compared to
the code for maintaining and using the database.
Paul
I use Linux (Debian). You mean
http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/RODBC/index.html? Is this a
recommended approach?
CCing back to list, just in case someone else is interested...
Faheem.
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