2009/5/6 Emmanuel Charpentier <charp...@bacbuc.dyndns.org>: > Le mercredi 06 mai 2009 à 00:22 -0400, Farrel Buchinsky a écrit : >> Is R an appropriate tool for data manipulation and data reshaping and data >> organizing? > [ Large Snip ! ... ] > > Depends on what you have to do. > > I've done what can be more or less termed "data management" with almost > uncountable tools (from Excel (sigh...) to R with SQL, APL, Pascal, C, > Basic (in 1982 !), Fortran and even Lisp in passing...).
> > SQL has strong points : join is, to my tastes, more easily expressed in > SQL than in most languages, projection and aggregation are natural. > > However, in SQL, there is no "natural" ordering of row tables, which > makes expressing algorithms using this order difficult. Try for example > to express the differences of a time series ... (it can be done, but it > is *not* a pretty sight). > > On the other hand, R has some unique expressive possibilities (reshape() > comes to mind). > > So I tend to use a combination of tools : except for very small samples, > I tend to manage my data in SQL and with associated tools (think data > editing, for example ; a simple form in OpenOffice's Base is quite easy > to create, can handle anything for which an ODBC driver exists, and > won't crap out for more than a few hundreds line...). finer manipulation > is usually done in R with native tools and sqldf. > But, at least in my trade, the ability to handle Excel files is a must > (this is considered as a standard for data entry. Sigh ...). So the > first task is usually a) import data in an SQL database, and b) prepare > some routines to dump SQL tables / R dataframes in Excel tor returning > back to the original data author... I don't think Excel is a standard tool for data entry. Epidata entry is much more professional. > > HTH > > Emmanuel Charpentier > > ______________________________________________ > R-help@r-project.org mailing list > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help > PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html > and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code. > -- HUANG Ronggui, Wincent PhD Candidate Dept of Public and Social Administration City University of Hong Kong Home page: http://asrr.r-forge.r-project.org/rghuang.html ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
