factbook-package: World Factbook SQLite Database in R

In mskyttner/factbook: World Factbook Example Data using RSQLite and FTS

Description

This package provides data access to some curated data from the World Factbook provided in the SQLite database format.

Details

A local SQLite db is created based a distribution of some World Factbook data from https://github.com/factbook/factbook.sql/releases/download/v0.1/factbook.db

It is created by extending the remotely distributed database to support Full Text Search and this extended database is then exposed in through this package through a couple of functions by way of tibbles.

The idea is to show how to provide access to a potentially larger database and how to enable use of in-built full text search capabilities in SQLite by downloading potentially big remote data and installing it locally using https://rdrr.io/cran/rappdirs/

This can be relevant if you are considering to release a package to CRAN that provides access to datasets to R and you also want to follow the general recommendation from the CRAN checks that "package data should be smaller than a megabyte" thus avoiding having to argue separately with the CRAN gods for making an exception to this rule (see details at: http://r-pkgs.had.co.nz/data.html#data-cran).

With this approach, your package can stay small. There are a few minor practical drawbacks - mostly that your package will initially not work off-line until at least one initial successfull call to download the data has been made using factbook_download which would require a connection to the Internet.

The upside is being able to tap into things like Full Text Search for datasets and with this approach the package can stay small and pass the CRAN checks without requiring exceptions, while the dataset size is only limited to 2TB (an SQLite limitation).

mskyttner/factbook documentation built on June 14, 2019, 12:05 a.m.