This post describes a few different aspects behind the scenes of the development of dittodb which recently went through the rOpenSci peer review process and was released to CRAN on 24 July 2020.This isn’t an introduction to the package itself (that’s available on dittodb’s site), but rather a look behind the scenes of the conceiving of the idea, the inspiration for, some of the development of, and history behind dittodb.

This week version 2.0 of the mongolite package has been released to CRAN. Major new features in this release include support for MongoDB 4.0, GridFS, running database commands, and connection pooling. Mongolite is primarily an easy-to-use client to get data in and out of MongoDB. However it supports increasingly many advanced features like aggregation, indexing, map-reduce, streaming, encryption, and enterprise authentication.

DBI What is DBI? DBI is an R package. It defines an interface to relational database management systems (R/DBMS) that other R packages build upon to interact with a specific relational database, such as SQLite or PostgreSQL. NoSQL NoSQL databases are a very broad class of database that can include document databases such as CouchDB and MongoDB, key-value stores such as Redis, and more.

Nearly 4 years ago I wrote on this blog about an R package solr for working with the database Solr. Since then we’ve created a refresh of that package in the solrium package. Since solrium first hit CRAN about two years ago, users have raised a number of issues that required breaking changes. Thus, this blog post is about a major version bump in solrium. What is Solr?

elastic is an R client for Elasticsearch elastic has been around since 2013, with the first commit in November, 2013. What is Elasticsearch? If you aren’t familiar with Elasticsearch, it is a distributed, RESTful search and analytics engine.It’s similar to Solr. It falls in the NoSQL bin of databases, holding data in JSON documents, insteadof rows and columns.

After 2.5 years of development, version 1.0 of the mongolite package has been released to CRAN. The package is now stable, well documented, and will soon be submitted for peer review to be onboarded in the rOpenSci suite. MongoDB in R and mongolite I started working on mongolite in September 2014, and it was first announced at the rOpenSci unconf 2015.

There are many different databases. The most familiar are row-column SQL databases like MySQL, SQLite, or PostgreSQL. Another type of database is the key-value store, which as a concept is very simple: you save a value specified by a key, and you can retrieve a value by its key. One more type is the document database, which instead of storing rows and columns, stores blobs of text or even binary files.