PivotalR is a package that enables users of R, the most popular open source statistical programming language and environment, to interact with Greenplum Database and the PostgreSQL for big data analytics. It does so by providing an interface to the operations on tables/views in the database. These operations are almost the same as those of data.frame. Minimal amount of data is transfered between R and the database. Thus the users of R do not need to learn SQL when they operate on the objects in the database. PivotalR also lets the user to run the functions of the open source machine learning package Apache MADlib directly from R.

1. An Introduction to PivotalR

    vignette("pivotalr") # execute in R console to view the PDF file
   

2. To install PivotalR:

   • Get the latest stable version from CRAN by running install.packages("PivotalR")

   • Or try out the latest development version from github by running the following code (need R >= 3.0.2):

     ## install.packages("devtools") # 'devtools' package is only available for R >= 3.0.2
     devtools::install_github("PivotalR", "greenplum-db")
     

   • Or download the source tarball directly from here, and then install the tarball

     install.packages("greenplum-db-PivotalR-xxxx.tar.gz", repos = NULL, type = "source")
     

   where "greenplum-db-PivotalR-xxxx.tar.gz" is the name of the package that you have downloaded.

3. To get started:

   • Read the wiki
   • Look at some demo code
   • Watch a training video
   • Read the quick-start guide