Analyze Vercel Data in R via JDBC

Jerod Johnson
Jerod Johnson
Director, Technology Evangelism
Use standard R functions and the development environment of your choice to analyze Vercel data with the CData JDBC Driver for Vercel.

Access Vercel data with pure R script and standard SQL on any machine where R and Java can be installed. You can use the CData JDBC Driver for Vercel and the RJDBC package to work with remote Vercel 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 Vercel and visualize Vercel data by calling standard R functions.

Install R

You can match the driver's performance gains from multi-threading and managed code by running the multithreaded Microsoft R Open or by running open R linked with the BLAS/LAPACK libraries. This article uses Microsoft R Open 3.2.3, which is preconfigured to install packages from the Jan. 1, 2016 snapshot of the CRAN repository. This snapshot ensures reproducibility.

Load the RJDBC Package

To use the driver, download the RJDBC package. After installing the RJDBC package, the following line loads the package:

library(RJDBC)

Connect to Vercel as a JDBC Data Source

You will need the following information to connect to Vercel as a JDBC data source:

  • Driver Class: Set this to cdata.jdbc.api.APIDriver
  • Classpath: Set this to the location of the driver JAR. By default this is the lib subfolder of the installation folder.

The DBI functions, such as dbConnect and dbSendQuery, provide a unified interface for writing data access code in R. Use the following line to initialize a DBI driver that can make JDBC requests to the CData JDBC Driver for Vercel:

driver <- JDBC(driverClass = "cdata.jdbc.api.APIDriver", classPath = "MyInstallationDir\lib\cdata.jdbc.api.jar", identifier.quote = "'") 

You can now use DBI functions to connect to Vercel and execute SQL queries. Initialize the JDBC connection with the dbConnect function.

Using API Key Authentication

Vercel uses Bearer token authentication. You can use either a personal access token or an OAuth access token as the API key.

To obtain a personal access token:

  1. Log into your Vercel account at https://vercel.com/
  2. Navigate to Account Settings > Tokens.
  3. Click Create Token, enter a name and expiration, and click Create.
  4. Copy the generated token (it will only be shown once).

After obtaining your token, set the following connection properties:

  • AuthScheme: Set this to APIKey.
  • APIKey: Set this to your Vercel personal access token or OAuth access token.

Example Connection String

Profile=C:\profiles\Vercel.apip;AuthScheme=APIKey;APIKey=your_access_token;

Working with Teams

Many Vercel resources are scoped to a team. To scope all requests to a specific team, set the TeamId connection property to your team's ID. You can find your team ID by querying the Teams table or from the Vercel dashboard. Alternatively, you can specify TeamId in your SQL queries using the WHERE clause where supported.

Connecting to Vercel

Once the authentication is configured, you can connect to Vercel and query data from any of the available tables such as Projects, Deployments, Teams, and Domains.

Built-in Connection String Designer

For assistance in constructing the JDBC URL, use the connection string designer built into the Vercel JDBC Driver. Either double-click the JAR file or execute the jar file from the command-line.

java -jar cdata.jdbc.api.jar

Fill in the connection properties and copy the connection string to the clipboard.

Below is a sample dbConnect call, including a typical JDBC connection string:

conn <- dbConnect(driver,"jdbc:api:Profile=C:\profiles\Vercel.apip;AuthScheme=APIKey;APIKey=your_access_token;")

Schema Discovery

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

dbListTables(conn)

Execute SQL Queries

You can use the dbGetQuery function to execute any SQL query supported by the Vercel API:

user <- dbGetQuery(conn,"SELECT ,  FROM User WHERE  = ''")

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

View(user)

Plot Vercel Data

You can now analyze Vercel 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(user$, main="Vercel User", names.arg = user$, horiz=TRUE)

Ready to get started?

Connect to live data from Vercel with the API Driver

Connect to Vercel