arkdb: Archive and Unarchive Databases Using Flat Files

The goal of arkdb is to provide a convenient way to move data from large compressed text files (tsv, csv, etc) into any DBI-compliant database connection (e.g. MYSQL, Postgres, SQLite; see DBI), and move tables out of such databases into text files. The key feature of arkdb is that files are moved between databases and text files in chunks of a fixed size, allowing the package functions to work with tables that would be much too large to read into memory all at once.

v0.0.4 Changes

• unark() will strip out non-compliant characters in table names by default.
• unark() gains the optional argument tablenames, allowing the user to specify the corresponding table names manually, rather than enforcing they correspond with the incoming file names. #18
• unark() gains the argument encoding, allowing users to directly set the encoding of incoming files. Previously this could only be set by setting options(encoding), which will still work as well. See FAO.R example in examples for an illustration.
• unark() will now attempt to guess which streaming parser to use (e.g csv or tsv) based on the file extension pattern, rather than defaulting to a tsv parser. (ark() still defaults to exporting in the more portable tsv format).