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The Gmail ODBC Driver is a powerful tool that allows you to connect with live Internet E-mail (Gmail), directly from any applications that support ODBC connectivity.

Access Gmail folders and message data like you would a database - read, write, and send E-mails through a standard ODBC Driver interface.

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Analyze Gmail Data in R


Create data visualizations and use high-performance statistical functions to analyze Gmail data in Microsoft R Open.

Access Gmail data with pure R script and standard SQL. You can use the CData ODBC Driver for Gmail and the RODBC package to work with remote Gmail data in R. By using the CData Driver, you are leveraging a driver written for industry-proven standards to access your data in the popular, open-source R language. This article shows how to use the driver to execute SQL queries to Gmail data and visualize Gmail data in R.

Install R

You can complement the driver's performance gains from multi-threading and managed code by running the multithreaded Microsoft R Open or by running R linked with the BLAS/LAPACK libraries. This article uses Microsoft R Open (MRO).

Connect to Gmail as an ODBC Data Source

Information for connecting to Gmail follows, along with different instructions for configuring a DSN in Windows and Linux environments.

There are two ways to authenticate to Gmail. Before selecting one, first ensure that you have enabled IMAP access in your Gmail account settings. See the "Connecting to Gmail" section under "Getting Started" in the installed documentation for a guide.

The User and Password properties, under the Authentication section, can be set to valid Gmail user credentials.

Alternatively, instead of providing the Password, you can use the OAuth authentication standard. To access Google APIs on behalf on individual users, you can use the embedded credentials or you can register your own OAuth app.

OAuth also enables you to use a service account to connect on behalf of users in a Google Apps domain. To authenticate with a service account, you will need to register an application to obtain the OAuth JWT values.

In addition to the OAuth values, you will need to provide the User. See the "Getting Started" chapter in the help documentation for a guide to using OAuth.

When you configure the DSN, you may also want to set the Max Rows connection property. This will limit the number of rows returned, which is especially helpful for improving performance when designing reports and visualizations.

Windows

If you have not already, first specify connection properties in an ODBC DSN (data source name). This is the last step of the driver installation. You can use the Microsoft ODBC Data Source Administrator to create and configure ODBC DSNs.

Linux

If you are installing the CData ODBC Driver for Gmail in a Linux environment, the driver installation predefines a system DSN. You can modify the DSN by editing the system data sources file (/etc/odbc.ini) and defining the required connection properties.

/etc/odbc.ini

[CData Gmail Source] Driver = CData ODBC Driver for Gmail Description = My Description User = username Password = password

For specific information on using these configuration files, please refer to the help documentation (installed and found online).

Load the RODBC Package

To use the driver, download the RODBC package. In RStudio, click Tools -> Install Packages and enter RODBC in the Packages box.

After installing the RODBC package, the following line loads the package:

library(RODBC)

Note: This article uses RODBC version 1.3-12. Using Microsoft R Open, you can test with the same version, using the checkpoint capabilities of Microsoft's MRAN repository. The checkpoint command enables you to install packages from a snapshot of the CRAN repository, hosted on the MRAN repository. The snapshot taken Jan. 1, 2016 contains version 1.3-12.

library(checkpoint) checkpoint("2016-01-01")

Connect to Gmail Data as an ODBC Data Source

You can connect to a DSN in R with the following line:

conn <- odbcConnect("CData Gmail Source")

Schema Discovery

The driver models Gmail APIs as relational tables, views, and stored procedures. Use the following line to retrieve the list of tables:

sqlTables(conn)

Execute SQL Queries

Use the sqlQuery function to execute any SQL query supported by the Gmail API.

inbox <- sqlQuery(conn, "SELECT Subject, Size FROM Inbox", believeNRows=FALSE, rows_at_time=1)

You can view the results in a data viewer window with the following command:

View(inbox)

Plot Gmail Data

You can now analyze Gmail data with any of the data visualization packages available in the CRAN repository. You can create simple bar plots with the built-in bar plot function:

par(las=2,ps=10,mar=c(5,15,4,2)) barplot(inbox$Size, main="Gmail Inbox", names.arg = inbox$Subject, horiz=TRUE)