Tag Archives: SQL

PMean: My work on a CTSA grant

This page is moving to a new website.

I’m on a Clincal and Translational Science Award (CTSA) research grant (5UL1TR000001-05, formerly 1U54RR031295-01A1), which is pretty cool. My name is even mentioned a few times in the grant. I thought that as I plan what I would do for this grant, I would see what the grant promised and write down what, exactly, that those promises mean. As I talk with various people (especially Russ Waitman, who is supervising my work on this grant), I will revise and update my plans. Still, I thought it would be valuable to put some thoughts down now, both to help me focus on what I should be doing and to offer an early draft of those ideas to the various people that I will end up interacting with. Continue reading

Recommended: beanumber repository

This page is moving to a new website.

This is the github repository of Ben Baumer. He is one of the co-authors of “Modern Data Science with R” and the data and code from that book is available here. He also provides code and data for OpenWAR, an open source method for calculating a baseball statistic, Wins Above Replacement. Finally, there is an R library for extracting, transforming, and loading “medium” sized datasets into SQL. Medium here means multi-gigabyte sized files. Related to this are a couple of “medium” sized data sets from the Internet Movie Database and from the NYC CitiBike dataset. Continue reading

Recommended: Where Do You Run Your R Scripts?

I’m an experienced R programmer trying to learn a little about SQL. One of my good friends who lives totally in the database world (I call her the Teradata Queen), shared a link to a blog post at SQLServerCentral about using R. Microsoft is including R in its SQL Server distribution, so this is an opportunity for a lot of interesting work combining the data manipulation power of SQL Server with the data analysis power of R. Anyway, the blog post explains some of the cost and performance issues associated with R scripts running on a SQL Server CPU. Continue reading

Recommended: Oracle Dates and Times

I’m working with R and SQL, and some of the work uses SQLite, and some of the work uses Oracle. There are subtle differences between the two, and for that matter between any two database programs. While there are SQL standards, most packages have minor deviations, or enhancements. Dates in Oracle represent one deviation. In particular, Oracle does not use the ISO 8601 standard date format (yyyy-mm-dd) by default. Here’s a nice overview of how to work with Oracle dates. Continue reading

Recommended: 10 Easy Steps to a Complete Understanding of SQL

This page outlines some of the fundamental properties of SQL programming that you need to know as you start learning SQL. For example, SQL is a declarative language, meaning that you tell it what you want and not how to compute it. Also SQL syntax is not well-ordered, meaning that the order in which SQL statements are evaluated is not the same as the order that they appear. Continue reading