Hi Rex, Take a look at the Data Import/Export manual that ships with R to get a feel for some of your options. I use a variety of techniques depending on what I am doing. Quite often I use MySQL, accessing my tables via RODBC. Other times text files are most appropriate. Then on other occasions I am given datasets in DBF, stata, spss, or some other format and use the foreign package to import them.
When I have tables of data that I know are not going to change I often save them as Rdata files, document them and make a simple package of them so that I can load them quickly and I have the information I need about the dataset and variables to hand (very useful months later when I've forgotten what half the variables represent). Dave On Fri, 2006-03-24 at 23:13 -0500, Rex Eastbourne wrote: > Hi, > > I just downloaded R, and am wondering about data sources. > > Where do people typically get their data for analysis? It seems to me > most people would have their data somehow automatically gathered and > stored in an SQL database (e.g. MySQL), but this seems not to be the > case. Does everyone just use the plain-text tab-separated values > format? If so, how are these tables typically created in the first > place? I store a lot of data automatically in MySQL databases--is > there another good way of aggregating data for statistical analysis > that I might be unaware of? > > Thank you, > > Rex > > ______________________________________________ > [email protected] mailing list > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help > PLEASE do read the posting guide! http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html ______________________________________________ [email protected] mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide! http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
