RMySQL "lost connection" during dbWriteTable()

I've had this problem before, writing over a slow internet connection
and I believe it would be nice to make the dbWriteTable command do
this... but I haven't had the chance to do anything useful about it,
other than write this quick and dirty function for myself.  This
function carelessly re-uses dbConnect which can exhaust available
connections, but it could be adapted to do a check, like the appended
dbReconnect function.  Hope that helps...  Krzysztof

dbRobustWriteTable <- function(conn, user, password, host, dbname,
name, value, tries) {
     numFullChunks <- nrow(value)%/%100
     lengthLastChunk <- nrow(value)%%100
     if (numFullChunks >= 1) {
         writeSeqFullChunks <- data.frame(Start =
seq(0,numFullChunks-1,1)*100+1, Stop = seq(1,numFullChunks,1)*100)
     }
     writeSeqLastChunk <- data.frame(Start = numFullChunks*100+1, Stop
= numFullChunks*100+lengthLastChunk)
     if (numFullChunks >= 1) {
         writeSeqAllChunks <- rbind(writeSeqFullChunks,writeSeqLastChunk)
     } else { writeSeqAllChunks <- writeSeqLastChunk }

     for(i in 1:nrow(writeSeqAllChunks)) {
             try <- 0
             rowSeq <-
seq(writeSeqAllChunks$Start[i],writeSeqAllChunks$Stop[i],1)
             while (!dbWriteTable(conn = conn, name = name, value =
value[rowSeq,], overwrite = FALSE, append = TRUE) & try < tries) {
                 conn  <-
dbConnect(MySQL(),user=user,password=password,host=host,dbname=dbname)
                 try <- try + 1
                 if (try == tries) { stop("EPIC FAIL") }
                 print(paste("Fail number",try,"epical fail
at",tries,"tries.",sep = " "))
             }
     }
}


dbReconnect <- function(
   conn = NULL,
   idFile = NULL,
   drv = MySQL()
) {
     if (  is.null(idFile) ) {
         stop('Can\'t reconnect, no id.')
     }
     if ( !is.null(conn) ) {
       tryCatch(
         expr = dbDisconnect( conn = conn ),
         error = function(cond) {
           print(cond)
         }
       )
     }
     ev = new.env()
     load( file = idFile, envir = ev )
     ev$drv <- drv
     conn <- with(
         data = ev,
         expr = dbConnect(
             drv = drv,
             user = user,
             password = pass,
             dbname = dbname,
             host = host
         )
     ); rm(ev)
     return(conn)

}



On Tue, Oct 1, 2013 at 8:45 AM, Magnus Thor Torfason
<zulutime.net at gmail.com> wrote:

When doing dbWriteTable() to write my (admittedly large) data.frame to a
MySQL database I randomly get the following error:

     dbWriteTable(conn, "tablename", data)

Error in mysqlExecStatement(conn, statement, ...) :
   RS-DBI driver: (could not run statement: Lost connection to MySQL server
during query)

Googling on MySQL in general suggests that this can be the result of sending
too big of a chunk of data to MySQL at the same time.

But the data.frame sits comfortably in memory and the table sits comfortably
in the database. So it is disappointing that what I thought was the
recommended way to achieve this task (dbWriteTable), should be a bottleneck.

I suppose I could write a loop around dbWriteTable(), writing only a few
rows of the data.frame at the same time, but that seems like something that
dbWriteTable() should be doing internally.

Are there any good suggestions on what I should do?

Best,
Magnus