How to establish a connection to a remote Redash database using R

Question

I want to use R, and specifically the {DBI} package, to access a remote Redash DB. Typically, DBI requires to establish a connection first. Such as:

# taken from: https://r4ds.hadley.nz/databases.html#connecting-to-a-database
con <- DBI::dbConnect(
  RMariaDB::MariaDB(), 
  username = "foo"
)
## or
con <- DBI::dbConnect(
  RPostgres::Postgres(), 
  hostname = "databases.mycompany.com", 
  port = 1234
)

Similarly, there's a package that supports accessing AWS:

library(DBI)
library(noctua)

con <- dbConnect(noctua::athena(),
                aws_access_key_id='YOUR_ACCESS_KEY_ID',
                aws_secret_access_key='YOUR_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY',
                s3_staging_dir='s3://path/to/query/bucket/',
                region_name='eu-west-1')

My question: is there a similar (or any!) way to access a Redash DB from R?

Answer 1

To connect to a Redash database using R and the {DBI} package:

1. Determine the database type (e.g. PostgreSQL)
2. Install the R package for that type (e.g. RPostgreSQL)
3. Load the {DBI} and the driver package
4. Use dbConnect() to establish a connection using the appropriate parameters
5. Query the database with {DBI} functions and close the connection with dbDisconnect().

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