The dynamic duo: SQL & R

There's a point in every data wranglers' career in which their full dataset can no longer fit into just CSV files, and the journey to database-world begins.

The dynamic duo: SQL & R

January 21, 2021

There's a point in every data wranglers' career in which their full dataset can no longer fit into just CSV files, and the journey to database-world begins. I reached this point about two years ago, when I transitioned from ecological research to the world of eCommerce fraud prevention. My calls to read_csv became scarcer as I came to rely more and more on databases. In this talk, I'll demonstrate how I use R and SQL to access database tables, and how I incorporate both into my daily workflow, aided by features in RStudio IDE. I'll also discuss our company’s "riskiconn" package for handling database connections and queries, which includes customizations to simplify day-to-day data querying.

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Additional Videos

Irene Steves and Javier Luraschi Q&A 1

Irene Steves and Javier Luraschi Q&A 2


About the speaker

Irene holds an M.Sc. in Ecology and a B.A. in Integrative Biology, through which she first discovered R and data science. Her interest in data led her to the Arctic Data Center at the University of California Santa Barbara, a summer internship at RStudio, and ultimately to the Research & Data Science department at Riskified, where she now explores the complex patterns of fraud in eCommerce. In her free time, she studies Hebrew through podcasts and dubbed kids’ movies.