PivotalR is a package that enables users of R, the most popular open source statistical programming language and environment to interact with the Pivotal (Greenplum) Database as well as Pivotal HD / HAWQ and the open-source database 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 system. 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 big-data machine learning package 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", "pivotalsoftware")
     

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

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

   where "pivotalsoftware-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
   • View the pivotal demo slides