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Beyond R-stats: Workflow Management & Data Engineering in R

This repository contains materials associated with the lightning talk given at the Boston useR Group meetup on October 20, 2020.

The file intro.R provides examples of the R functions discussed in the lightning talk.

This code in this talk utilizes two unique packages, the fs package and the DBI package:

1. The fs package is used to interface with the file system (create directories, move files, etc.). Though R has base functions that do a lot of this (dir.create(), file.copy(), etc.), a list of reasons why fs functions are a safer choice can be found here.

2. The DBI package is used to interface with database management systems, such as Postgres, SQL Server, SQLite, etc. In this talk, we will showcase how to send SQL statements to a SQLite database via the functions in this package.

How it All Works Together...

The talk begins by demonstrating moving around the file system with both base R and the fs package. The intro.R script demonstrates how to write a dataframe to a delimited file, remove files from a directory, copying a file from one directory to another, and renaming files. At the end of the script, a SQLite database (and database table) are created.

The second part of the talk showcases how to use the DBI package to write data to a SQLite database. A Shiny app was created to demonstrate how a user's manual input, as well as a user's characteristics (using R environmental variables garnered from the Sys.getenv() base R function) can be captured within a Shiny app and written to a SQLite database with -- literally -- the "click of a button!".