dbpath
dbpath is an R library for creating database connections via a single string (url).
Install
remotes::install_github("machow/dbpath")
Examples
library(dbpath)
sql_url <- dbpath("postgresql+RPostgres://some_user:some_password@localhost:5432")
sql_url
[1] "postgresql+RPostgres://some_user:****@localhost:5432"
You can use the dbpath
output with either DBI::dbConnect, or dplyr::tbl to create a remote connection.
# get a database connection
con <- DBI::dbConnect(sql_url)
# get a database table called mtcars
tbl_mtcars <- dplyr::tbl(sql_url, "mtcars")
tbl_mtcars
URL Format
dbpath
URLs follow the format below.
<dialect>+<driver>://<username>:<password>@<host>:<port>/<database>
Here's an example using mysql:
mysql_url <- "mysql+RMariaDB://root:some_password@localhost"
In this case, we're connecting to the mysql dialect, using R's MariaDB package as a driver.
The code below shows how it translates to making the connection manually.
# dbpath
DBI::dbConnect(mysql_url)
# manual
DBI::dbConnect(
RMariaDB::MariaDB(),
user = "root",
password = "some_password",
host = "localhost"
)
Behind the scenes, dbpath
uses driver hooks to know that if RMariaDB is the driver, then we need its MariaDB() object.
Note that the RMariaDB
in mysql+RMariaDB
is optional!
Interoperability with Python
dbpath's
approach is based on python's SQLAlchemy library.
This means that you can use the same string across languages!
<!-- python example -->
R | python |
---|---|
# one string to rule them all
sql_url = "postgresql://user:password@localhost:port/dbname"
|
|
library(dbpath)
DBI::dbconnection(sql_url) |
import sqlalchemy
sqlalchemy.create_engine(sql_url) |
Configuring Driver Selection
The code below adds a custom driver for SQLite.
library(dbpath)
driver_registry$set(my_driver = function () RSQLite::SQLite)
# Note the 3 slashes, rather than two, meaning no user name, password, or host
sqlite_url <- "sqlite+my_driver:///:memory:"
sqlite_url
[1] "sqlite+my_driver://:****@/:memory:"
DBI::dbConnect(sqlite_url)
<SQLiteConnection>
Path: :memory:
Extensions: TRUE
Available Driver Hooks
# see available drivers
driver_registry$get()
# see defaults for when no driver is specified
driver_defaults$get()
Here are the current driver defaults:
postgresql mysql mariadb
"RPostgres" "RMariaDB" "RMariaDB"
Configuring Driver Connections
dbpath uses an s3 method called dbpath_params
to get a list of parameters to pass to DBI::dbConnect
(or dplyr::tbl
).
url <- dbpath("postgresql://a_user:a_password@localhost/dbname")
dbpath_params(url)
$drv
<PqDriver>
$user
[1] "a_user"
$password
[1] "a_password"
$host
[1] "localhost"
$port
[1] ""
$dbname
[1] "dbname"
In order to support a new driver type, you can register an s3 method for it. The function should return a list of parameters, whose names are the arguments that would be passed to DBI::dbConnect.
dbpath_params.PqDriver <- function(driver, url) {
list(
drv = driver
user = url$user,
password = url$password,
host = url$host,
port = url$port,
# use PqDriver specific argument: dbname
dbname = url$database
)
}
You can get a specific drivers parameters by passing it as the first argument to dbpath_params
:
driver <- RPostgres::Postgres()
class(driver) # <PqDriver>
dbpath_params(driver, url)