R in SQL Server: Output data frame into a table

Question

This probably has a simple answer but I cannot figure it out as I'm still getting a hang of working with R in SQL Server. I have a piece of code that reads in data from a SQL Server table, executes in R and returns a data frame.

execute sp_execute_external_script
    @language=N'R',
    @script=N'inp_dat=InputDataSet
    inp_dat$NewCol=max(inp_dat$col1,inp_dat$col2)
    new_dat=inp_dat
    OutputDataSet=new_dat'
    @input_data_1=N'select * from IM_COMP_TEST_SQL2016.dbo.temp_table';

I want to insert new_dat into a SQL Server table (select * into new_table from new_dat). How do I go about this?

Answer 1

As shown in this tutorial, you can use INSERT INTO ... EXEC in a previously created table with columns aligning to script's dataframe return:

INSERT INTO Table1
execute sp_execute_external_script
    @language=N'R',
    @script=N'inp_dat <- InputDataSet
              inp_dat$NewCol <- max(inp_dat$col1,inp_dat$col2)
              new_dat <- inp_dat',
    @input_data_1=N'SELECT * FROM IM_COMP_TEST_SQL2016.dbo.temp_table',
    @output_data_1=N'newdat';

However, to use the make-table query may require OPENQUERY() or OPENROWSET() using an ad-hoc distributed query as described in this SO Post to return the output of stored procedure:

Stored Procedure

CREATE PROCEDURE dbo.R_DataFrame

AS

BEGIN
    execute sp_execute_external_script
        @language=N'R',
        @script=N'inp_dat <- InputDataSet
                  inp_dat$NewCol <- max(inp_dat$col1,inp_dat$col2)
                  new_dat <- inp_dat',
        @input_data_1=N'SELECT * FROM IM_COMP_TEST_SQL2016.dbo.temp_table',
        @output_data_1=N'newdat';

        -- ADD ALL COLUMN TYPES;
        WITH RESULT SETS (("newdat" [col1] varchar(20), [col2] double, [col3] int ...));
END
GO

Action Query

SELECT * INTO Table1 
FROM OPENROWSET('SQLNCLI', 'Server=(local);Trusted_Connection=yes;',
                'EXEC dbo.R_DataFrame')