David Robinson - dbcooper: Turn any database into an R package

dbcooper: Turn any database into an R package by David Robinson

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Abstract: If your organization uses a database, then you have a lot to gain by building an R package to make interfacing with that database easy and intuitive. Packages like DBI and odbc handle the creation of the database connection, and dbplyr lets you translate dplyr syntax to SQL. But there’s a missing layer in between, such that working with a connection object still doesn’t feel like exploring and joining tables in memory. In this talk I’ll introduce the dbcooper package, which wraps any database connection to turn it into a set of R functions, making it easy to create a database-specific R package. dbcooper makes the management of connections transparent so that you engage with the database through prefixed functions, as well as generating autocomplete-friendly accessors for each table for fast exploratory data analysis. I’ve used this general approach as the foundation of a data science ecosystem at several companies, and I’ll show an example of using the package to explore a public BigQuery database.

Twitter:   / drob  

Presented at the 2021 New York R Conference (September 10, 2021)