Giving up on RODBC, using RJDBC 0.2 instead

Hi all,

Just wanted to update folks on my ongoing struggles to connect to Oracle
databases. After trying to deal with several data-corruption and crash bugs,
especially when connecting on 64-bit Linux and Mac OS machines, I must
conclude that RODBC is no longer actively being developed or supported. I've
received several good suggestions from several people on this list, but
nothing from the package author, and I have seen no interest in integrating
my suggested patch for one of my problems. It's too bad that this very
useful package is no longer a viable option for many people.

To the contrary, after seeing someone on twitter note that RJDBC is under
active development again by Simon Urbanek (if you're reading this -- thank
you!), the NULL->NA mapping works, and core code has been rewritten in Java
for speed, I installed the dev version (0.2) and downloaded the JDBC driver
this morning. Pulling data worked the first time.

I would urge anyone dealing with the many issues with RODBC to try using
RJDBC instead.

http://www.rforge.net/RJDBC/news.html
http://twitter.com/#!/michaelv2/status/69403127899619329

 -Harlan