NOTE: this package is being phased out in favor of the new RMariaDB package.

Database Interface and MySQL Driver for R

RMySQL is a database interface and MySQL driver for R. This version complies with the database interface definition as implemented in the package DBI 0.2-2.

library(DBI)
# Connect to my-db as defined in ~/.my.cnf
con <- dbConnect(RMySQL::MySQL(), group = "my-db")
dbListTables(con)
dbWriteTable(con, "mtcars", mtcars)
dbListTables(con)
dbListFields(con, "mtcars")
dbReadTable(con, "mtcars")
# You can fetch all results:
res <- dbSendQuery(con, "SELECT * FROM mtcars WHERE cyl = 4")
dbFetch(res)
dbClearResult(res)
# Or a chunk at a time
res <- dbSendQuery(con, "SELECT * FROM mtcars WHERE cyl = 4")
while(!dbHasCompleted(res)){
  chunk <- dbFetch(res, n = 5)
  print(nrow(chunk))
}
# Clear the result
dbClearResult(res)
# Disconnect from the database
dbDisconnect(con)

Binary packages for OS-X or Windows can be installed directly from CRAN:

install.packages("RMySQL")

The development version from github:

# install.packages("devtools")
devtools::install_github("r-dbi/DBI")
devtools::install_github("r-dbi/RMySQL")

Installation from source on Linux or OSX requires MariaDB Connector/C. On some older platforms you can also link against Oracle's libmysqlclient driver but the mariadb implementation is much better.

On recent Debian or Ubuntu install libmariadbclient-dev

sudo apt-get install -y libmariadbclient-dev

On Fedora, CentOS or RHEL we need mariadb-devel:

sudo yum install mariadb-devel

On OS-X use mariadb-connector-c from Homebrew:

brew install mariadb-connector-c

Instead of specifying a username and password in calls to dbConnect(), it's better to set up a MySQL configuration file that names the databases that you connect to most commonly. This file should live in ~/.my.cnf and look like:

[database_name]
option1=value1
option2=value2

If you want to run the examples, you'll need to set the proper options in the [rs-dbi] group of any MySQL option file, such as /etc/my.cnf or the .my.cnf file in your home directory. For a default single user install of MySQL, the following code should work:

[rs-dbi]
database=test
user=root
password=

Many thanks to Christoph M. Friedrich, John Heuer, Kurt Hornik, Torsten Hothorn, Saikat Debroy, Matthew Kelly, Brian D. Ripley, Mikhail Kondrin, Jake Luciani, Jens Nieschulze, Deepayan Sarkar, Louis Springer, Duncan Temple Lang, Luis Torgo, Arend P. van der Veen, Felix Weninger, J. T. Lindgren, Crespin Miller, and Michal Okonlewski, Seth Falcon and Paul Gilbert for comments, suggestions, bug reports, and patches.