Accessing Databases with R (RStudio)

R has libraries for accessing several databases, but if you're on Windows, you'd probably prefer the RODBC package; with this, you can access almost any db through ODBC. You can create a DSN and use odbcConnect, or use odbcDriverconnect ; the problem is figuring out the connection string, especially since you need to specify the driver. For SQL Server, this works (assuming db is in localhost):

library(RODBC)

c=odbcDriverConnect('Driver=SQL Server;Server=localhost;Database=......;Trusted_Connection=True')

And then you can do odbcquery like:

res=sqlQuery(c,"SELECT * FROM ....")

And you get a data frame !

http://www.connectionstrings.com/ has odbc connection strings for many dbs