For some reason, short names are popular as computer languages. Think of “C”. Another example is “R”.
R reminds me a bit of Matlab; it is an easy to learn language with immense statistical possibilities. It is compared to nowadays giants like SAS.
The advantage of R is that it is widely accepted by the academic community. This community contributes to R by adding new components to it. As R is open source, such additions can then be integrated into the R programme.
To test R, I tested how much time it took me to install R, set up a connection to Oracle and retrieve data from it.
It took me about an hour to install R and to write a Hello World programme. In the second hour, I tried to access an Oracle database. The problem I encountered that the Oracle database was based on a 32 bit architecture and my R installation was a 64 bit programme. That proved to be an issue.
I circumvented this by using JDBC. The script I used was:
library(RJDBC)
drv <- JDBC("oracle.jdbc.OracleDriver",classPath="D:/Users/tmaanen/app/tmaanen/product/11.2.0/client_1/jdbc/lib/ojdbc5.jar", " ") con <- dbConnect(drv, "jdbc:oracle:thin:@192.168.2.26:1521:xe", "scott", "password") dbGetQuery(con, "select * from scott.EMPLOYEES") dbDisconnect(con) It took me about an hour to figure this out. But then I had it. The nice thing about it, is that the script is very comparable to similar programmes. Nothing really special about it.