[R] Serverless databases in R

[Frank E Harrell Jr]

Barry Rowlingson wrote:
> On Sun, Apr 18, 2010 at 11:30 PM, kMan <kchamberln at gmail.com> wrote:
>> It was my understanding that .Rdata files were not very portable, and do not
>> natively handle queries. Otherwise we'd all just use .RData files instead of
>> farming the work out to SQL drivers & external libraries, and colleagues who
>> use, e.g. SAS or SPSS would also have no trouble with them.
> 
>  The "platform" in "cross-platform" to me generally means the
> operating system on which a program is running - and .Rdata files are
> perfectly portable between R on Linux, MacOSX, Windows, Solaris etc
> versions. You didn't mention portability to other statistical
> packages. You also didn't mention needing SQL, or what you wanted to
> do with your databases. I figured I'd just mention .Rdata files for
> completeness!
> 
>  There's also RJDBC and RODBC which can interface to anything with a
> JDBC or ODBC interface on your system.
> 
>  A .RData file could be considered as a serverless NoSQL database.
> There's a GSOC proposal to investigate interfaces to NoSQL databases
> and some info here:
> 
> http://rwiki.sciviews.org/doku.php?id=developers:projects:gsoc2010:nosql_interface
> 
>  Isn't it odd that the open-source R community has developed functions
> for reading in proprietary SAS and SPSS format files, but (AFAIK) the
> commercial sector doesn't seem to support reading data from
> open-sourced and open-specced R .Rdata files?
> 
> Barry

Hi Barry,

Stat Transfer can read and write R binary data frames (.rda files).

Frank
-- 
Frank E Harrell Jr   Professor and Chairman        School of Medicine
                      Department of Biostatistics   Vanderbilt University