MySQL is a mid-size, multi-platform RDBMS popular in the open source community. Some of its advantages include high-performance, open source, and free for non-commercial use. For a detailed discussion and tutorial on using relational databases with R (and hence S) see [4]; for more details on importing/exporting data into R see [5], for S-Plus see its User’s Guide. For details on obtaining and installing the software described here see the Appendix.

The R/S MySQL interface allows multiple connections to one or more MySQL servers simultaneously (up to 100 connections). Although each MySQL connection can only have one open result set (open query) at a time, this is not a serious limitation since we can very easily clone connections (see Section 4 for details). All functions described here are documented on-line – simply use help(MySQL), for instance, to read all the details.

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