Are there SQL datatypes that don't work with R?

Question

I am trying run an sqlQuery in Rstudio which seems to crash the program. I want to use the RODBC package to import a name called package name and elapsed time from a Oracle database. When I try to do an sqlQuery such as the following

dataframe <- sqlQuery(channel,
"select package_name, elapsed_time from fooSchema.barTable")

When I run this with just the package_name or other fields in the table, it works fine. If I try to run this with the elapsed_time, RStudio crashes. The datatype of elapsed_time is INTERVAL DAY (3) TO SECOND (6) so one record for example looks like this, "+000 00:00:00.22723"

Are there certain data types, such as Interval Day to Second, from Oracle that don't work in RStudio or R in general?

Answer 1

The problem isn't R, Rstudio, or even RODBC. The problem is that Oracle doesn't support interval data types for ODBC connections.

It is under section E.1

https://docs.oracle.com/cd/B28359_01/server.111/b32009/app_odbc.htm#CIHBFHCG

To get back to your question in a more general sense. Base R supports Date, POSIXct, and POSIXlt objects.

Dates and POSIXct objects are stored as the number of days/seconds respectively since 1/1/1970 whereas POSIXlt is a list of elements.

Whatever SQL connector you're using will need to coerce the SQL version of a date and time into one of the above. Sometimes it'll just convert to a character string. For instance with RPostgreSQL it'll take columns stored as Postgre's Date type as a character but Postgres timestamp columns will be coerced into POSIXct directly.