R: Create a connection to a DBMS

dbConnect {DBI} | R Documentation

## Create a connection to a DBMS

### Description

Connect to a DBMS going through the appropriate authentication procedure. Some implementations may allow you to have multiple connections open, so you may invoke this function repeatedly assigning its output to different objects. The authentication mechanism is left unspecified, so check the documentation of individual drivers for details.

### Usage

    dbConnect(drv, ...)

### Arguments

`drv` | an object that inherits from DBIDriver, or an existing DBIConnection object (in order to clone an existing connection).
`...` | authentication arguments needed by the DBMS instance; these typically include `user`, `password`, `host`, `port`, `dbname`, etc. For details see the appropriate `DBIDriver`.

### Value

`dbConnect()` returns an S4 object that inherits from DBIConnection. This object is used to communicate with the database engine.

### Specification

DBI recommends using the following argument names for authentication parameters, with `NULL` default:

- `user` for the user name (default: current user)

- `password` for the password

- `host` for the host name (default: local connection)

- `port` for the port number (default: local connection)

- `dbname` for the name of the database on the host, or the database file name

The defaults should provide reasonable behavior, in particular a local connection for `host = NULL`. For some DBMS (e.g., PostgreSQL), this is different to a TCP/IP connection to `localhost`.

### See Also

`dbDisconnect()` to disconnect from a database.

Other DBIDriver generics: `DBIDriver-class`, `dbDataType`, `dbDriver`, `dbGetInfo`, `dbIsValid`, `dbListConnections`

### Examples

    # SQLite only needs a path to the database. (Here, ":memory:" is a special
    # path that creates an in-memory database.) Other database drivers
    # will require more details (like user, password, host, port, etc.)
    con <- dbConnect(RSQLite::SQLite(), ":memory:")
    con

    dbListTables(con)

    dbDisconnect(con)

[Package DBI version 0.8 Index]