[R] Re : Large database help

[Robert Citek]

On May 16, 2006, at 8:15 AM, justin bem wrote:

> Try to open your db with MySQL and use RMySQL

I've seen this offered up as a suggestion a few times but with little  
detail.  In my experience, even using SQL to pull in data from a  
MySQL DB, R would need to load the entire data set into RAM before  
doing some calculations.  But perhaps I'm using RMySQL incorrectly[1].

As a toy problem, let's imagine a data set (foo) with a single  
numerical field (bar) and 1 billion records (1e9).  In MySQL one  
would do the following to calculate the mean:

   select avg(bar) from foo ;

For a smaller data set I would issue a select statement and then  
fetch the entire set into a data frame before calculating the mean.   
Given such a large data set, how would one calculate the mean using R  
connected to this MySQL database?  How would one calculate the median  
using R connected to this MySQL database?

Pointers to references appreciated.

[1] http://www.sourcekeg.co.uk/cran/src/contrib/Descriptions/RMySQL.html

Regards,
- Robert
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