DBI solution
On Fri, Nov 4, 2011 at 7:08 PM, Ben Nachtrieb <ben.nachtrieb at gmail.com> wrote:
Hello, I'm building (from the ground up) a PostgreSQL time series database for use with R. I'd like to get some preliminary guidance (help me get pointed in the correct direction). Here are some details: I am PC/Windows centric. I have data of all frequencies equal to or greater than Daily (no inter-day data). We have prices and technical data, macro data, company descriptive, and financial data. I don't have to do any 'DBA' stuff per-say (no messy stuff like split adjustments, ticker changes, etc.) as that is done for me; however, I will have to adjust for look-ahead, create new factor values, transform, etc. the data that we have and store it in database form. Can someone point me to the best solution/packages for this given that I have to stay in the R and PostgreSQL world? I see RpgSQL, RposgreSQL, TSPostgreSQL, DBI, TSdbi, and much more... I am hoping someone can narrow things down for me. Thanks so much!
RpgSQL and RPostgreSQL are DBI-based drivers for R and the others are higher level packages. I can only address my own package but RpgSQL was developed for use with sqldf. It uses RJDBC (which uses JDBC and Java) and DBI. Feedback is that RpgSQL is easier to install on Windows than alternatives. The use of RJDBC/JDBC may slow it down relative to alternatives although speed may not be material if you are just importing a bunch of time series and then working with them in R as opposed to constantly going back to the database. sqldf is a package that lets you use R data frames with several database back-ends including RpgSQL. You would not use sqldf with your own database but might use it with R data frames to play around with PostgreSQL. Resources are - the Installation info in this link: http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/RpgSQL/index.html - ?pgSQL help page (see example at end of page) - http://sqldf.googlecode.com most of which is about sqldf and sqlite although much of it applies and there is a bit about using PostgreSQL with sqldf.
Statistics & Software Consulting GKX Group, GKX Associates Inc. tel: 1-877-GKX-GROUP email: ggrothendieck at gmail.com