As I’ve noted here, the Computational Journalism Server “wants to be a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) when it grows up.” In plotting the way forward to that goal, I’ve looked at three options: Remain on openSUSE / SUSE Studio and ... [Read more...]

Books written to teach a general purpose programming language are usually organized according to the features of the language and examples often show how a particular language feature is interpreted by a compiler. Books about domain specific languages are usually organized in a way that makes sense in the corresponding ... [Read more...]

  The sqldf package can be used to run sql queries on R data frames. The user simply needs to specify a sql statement enclosed by quotation marks within the sqldf() function. In the follow R code, you see various ways of using the sqldf package to run sql queries on ... [Read more...]

Jeffrey Breen put together a useful slideshow on accessing databases from R. I use RODBC every single day to access my own local MySQL server from R. I've had trouble with RMySQL, so I've always used RODBC instead after setting up my localhost MySQL se... [Read more...]

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I've covered a few topics in the past including the plyr package, which is kind of like "GROUP BY" for R, and the merge function for merging datasets. I only recently found the sqldf package for R, and it's already one of the most useful packages I've ever installed. The ... [Read more...]

Download "Getting Started with the Social Media Analytics Research Toolkit" (pdf, 1.25 megabytes) Download the Social Media Analytics Research Toolkit Thanks to Drew Conway (@drewconway), a PhD student at New York University, there are now eight excell... [Read more...]

So for the rest of this conversation big data == 2 Gigs. Done. Don’t give me any of this ‘that’s not big, THIS is big’ shit. There now, on with the cool stuff: This week on twitter Vince Buffalo asked about loading a 2 gig comma separated file (csv) into R (... [Read more...]

Coming from a background writing SQL code directly for “real” RDBMS (Microsoft SQL Server, MySQL, and SQLite), I was initially confused when SAS would give me the following ‘note’ for a simple summary PROC SQL query: 429 proc sql; 430 create table undel_monthly as 431 select 432 year(date) as year, 433 month(date) ... [Read more...]