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The Oracle ODBC Driver is a powerful tool that allows you to connect with Oracle, directly from any applications that support ODBC connectivity.

Access Oracle databases from virtually anywhere through a standard ODBC Driver interface.

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Analyze Oracle Data in R


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

Access Oracle data with pure R script and standard SQL. You can use the CData ODBC Driver for Oracle and the RODBC package to work with remote Oracle 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 Oracle data and visualize Oracle 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 Oracle as an ODBC Data Source

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

To connect to Oracle, you'll first need to update your PATH variable and ensure it contains a folder location that includes the native DLLs. The native DLLs can be found in the lib folder inside the installation directory. Once you've done this, set the following to connect:

  • Port: The port used to connect to the server hosting the Oracle database.
  • User: The user Id provided for authentication with the Oracle database.
  • Password: The password provided for authentication with the Oracle database.
  • Service Name: The service name of the Oracle database.

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 Oracle 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 OracleOCI Source] Driver = CData ODBC Driver for Oracle Description = My Description User = myuser Password = mypassword Server = localhost Port = 1521

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 Oracle Data as an ODBC Data Source

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

conn <- odbcConnect("CData OracleOCI Source")

Schema Discovery

The driver models Oracle 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 Oracle API.

customers <- sqlQuery(conn, "SELECT CompanyName, City FROM Customers WHERE Country = US", believeNRows=FALSE, rows_at_time=1)

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

View(customers)

Plot Oracle Data

You can now analyze Oracle 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(customers$City, main="Oracle Customers", names.arg = customers$CompanyName, horiz=TRUE)