Introduction to databases and SQL

Databases are a powerful structure for holding huge amounts of data that can easily be accessed. Databases are made up of tables which are efficiently stored using indexing and avoiding unnecessary replication of information.

Chapter 1 covers details of databases and reviews R functionality (mostly through the dplyr package) for working with data frames that mimics SQL queries for working with tables.

Chapter 2 covers three different ways to run SQL queries in R. R code can be translated into SQL; the DBI package can send SQL queries through an r chunk; and SQL queries can be sent directly to a SQL server through a sql chunk. Additionally, DBeaver is introduced as a SQL client which supports MySQL.