QUICK INTRO TO R AND PL/R - PART 1

In this article we'll provide a summary of what PL/R is and how to get running with it. Since we don't like repeating ourselves, we'll refer you to an article we wrote a while ago which is still fairly relevant today called Up and Running with PL/R (PLR) in PostgreSQL: An almost Idiot's Guide and just fill in the parts that have changed. We should note that particular series was more geared toward the spatial database programmer (PostGIS in particular). There is a lot of overlap between the PL/R, R, and PostGIS user-base which is comprised of many environmental scientists and researchers in need of powerful charting and stats tools to analyse their data who are high on the smart but low on the money human spectrum.

This series will be more of a general PL/R user perspective. We'll follow more of the same style we did with Quick Intro to PL/Python. We'll end our series with a PL/R cheatsheet similar to what we had for PL/Python.

As stated in our State of PostGIS article, we'll be using log files we generated from our PostGIS stress tests. These stress tests were auto-generated from the PostGIS official documentation. The raster tests are comprised of 2,095 query executions exercising all the pixel types supported. The geometry/geograpy tests are comprised of 65,892 spatial SQL queries exercising every PostGIS geometry/geography supported in PostGIS 2.0 -- yes this includes TINS, Triangles,Polyhedral Surfaces, Curved geometries and all dimensions of them. Most queries are unique. If you are curious to see what these log tables look like or want to follow along with these exercises, you can download the tables from here.

What is R and PL/R and why should you care?
R is both a language and an environment for doing statistics and generating graphs and plots. It is GNU-licensed and a common favorite of Universities and Research institutions. PL/R is a procedural language for PostgreSQL that allows you to write database stored functions in R. R is a set-based and domain specific language similar to SQL except unlike the way relational databases treat data, it thinks of data as matrices, lists and vectors. I tend to think of it as a cross between LISP and SQL though more experienced Lisp and R users will probably disagree with me on that. This makes it easier in many cases to tabulate data both across columns as well as across rows. The examples we will show in these exercises, could be done in SQL, but they are much more succinct to write in R. In addition to the language itself, there are a whole wealth of statistical and graphing functions available in R that you will not find in any relational database. These functions are growing as more people contribute packages. Its packaging system called Comprehensive R Archive (CRAN) is similar in concept to Perl's CPAN and the in the works PGXN for PostgreSQL.

What do you need before you can use PL/R?
PostgreSQL and latest version of PL/R at this time plr-8.3.0.11 which works on PostgreSQL 8.3-9.0

Read more: Postgres OnLine Journal

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