Comments for Working With Data

Comment on Optimizing Data Access — Know your Hardware by enstavros

enstavros — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 23:07:15 +0000

This is such a great article! Organization is key and I love the book analogy. From this article, I have created a checklist by which to organize my data for my research. I can especially appreciate the key point of massaging the data and working out any kinks as opposed to brute force ramping up the computational power behind it. Thanks for the tips!

Comment on Using R — Easier Error Handling with try() by pid controllers

pid controllers — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 19:43:22 +0000

Thanks for finally writing about > Using R – Easier Error Handling with try() | Working With Data < Liked it!

Comment on Using R — Basic error Handing with tryCatch() by DavidC

DavidC — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 18:28:51 +0000

This is nice, thanks. I think a lot of people using R (including me, until recently) don’t have enough education/experience programming to be thinking about error-handling.

Comment on Using R — Basic error Handing with tryCatch() by Songpants

Songpants — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 10:58:25 +0000

Great post!

Wish I would have had it when I tackled my first tryCatch() approaches and came back quite puzzled from the help page – glad to hear I’m apparently not the only one that struggled with it ;-)

Best regards!

Comment on Data Structures — Tabular vs. Relational by Jonathan Callahan

Jonathan Callahan — Fri, 16 Sep 2011 16:24:22 +0000

Klaus,

I’m not entirely clear what you mean by perfect for duck typing but I’m assuming that the building blocks you describe can be thought of as objects. The first thing that comes to mind is to use Object Relational Mapping software to work with your objects as objects and let the ORM deal with storing them in an RDBMS.

Taking a step back, though, I have to ask how much data you can possibly have if each row corresponds to a swimming pool maintenance visit. Can you possibly generate more than 100,000 visits per year? That’s just not that much data unless you have truly voluminous metadata for each visit. Why not just have rows store as much of the metadata as possible in a single table and then have a very few related tables for the wordy metadata. As mentioned above, it’s not against the law to store oft-repeated metadata in additional columns. You could store the whole thing in an SQLite database for easy deployment and maintenance.