Rdbi package [forwarded msg]

Timothy H. Keitt wrote:

I haven't had time to fix up the data conversion stuff. I have some old 
routines from RPgSQL in Rdbi.PgSQL. The choice is to leave the 
conversion behavior undefined and let each specific implementation 
handle conversion however they see fit, or to define a set of generic 
functions to be subclassed. The latter is preferable, but probably 
difficult to get right given the heterogeneity among potential data 
sources. (Or more accurately, I mean that its difficult to do cleanly; 
if you cover all the marginal cases, it will get unwieldy.)

No need to do this, for the time being.  If I'm not mistaken, we're 
taking the Rdbi package to be a starting point for a common interface, 
so by necessity it will have to evolve as we gain experience with it
and its various driver implementations.  

I still think that we need a document (in English, that is) to describe 
the interface, its classes and generic functions, perhaps the various data 
conversion mechanisms, ways to query the metadata, and so forth
e.g., what to do with SQL keywords in R/S objects that we export to DBMS.
Also, it is in this kind of document were we could identify core and optional
features.  (Both the python and perl interfaces have such a 
specification document.)

Tim

David James wrote:

Kurt Hornik wrote:

M Edward Borasky writes:

Sounds good to me. At some point in the near future I may get a chance
to test it on a Windows box with MS Access; I've been using RODBC for
that.

Ok.  Will wait till tomorrow morning to allow for further reactions.

Not that I anticipate any major issues, but could we wait until the end
of this week?  I'd like to check a couple of things (one that Torsten
brought to my attention last week and has to do with data conversions,
and portability to Splus being the other).

I'm not running Splus, so I haven't tried to make it compatible. It 
would seem to be a good thing to do, although I admit, I've been pretty 
unhappy with Mathsoft in the past because of their callous attitude 
towards UNIX, which (as far as I know) is the environment where S 
originated.

I understand, and I wouldn't expect people to be doing both R and 
S implementations.  All I'm suggesting is to see if we could follow 
some simple guidelines to make it easier for other people to port 
from one system to the other.  My guess is that it'll be users and/or
some of us --not Insightful-- doing the porting.

Thanks,

Best,
-k

-----Original Message-----
From: r-sig-db-admin at stat.math.ethz.ch
[mailto:r-sig-db-admin at stat.math.ethz.ch]On Behalf Of Kurt Hornik
Sent: Sunday, September 30, 2001 2:58 AM
To: Kurt.Hornik at ci.tuwien.ac.at
Cc: David James; R-SIG-DB at stat.math.ethz.ch; Timothy H. Keitt; Saikat
DebRoy; Torsten Hothorn
Subject: [R-sig-DB] Re: Rdbi package [forwarded msg]
I have not seen any followup on this for almost a month.

Hence, I assume that everyone is happy with the new design, and suggest
to move Tim's package from contrib/Devel to contrib.

-k

-- 
Timothy H. Keitt
Department of Ecology and Evolution
State University of New York at Stony Brook
Stony Brook, New York 11794 USA
Phone: 631-632-1101, FAX: 631-632-7626
http://life.bio.sunysb.edu/ee/keitt/