Shared Workspaces in R?

Question

Does anyone have a recommendation for sharing workspaces and data frames in R? I'm working at a start-up and we have little experience working in larger production environments where lots of employees are all using the same data.

Is there a way to set permissions on data frames and share them? Or do orgs in our situation just store their data in a database like MySQL and just download it to data frames on a case-by-case basis?

Any tips would be greatly appeciated from those with experience in this area!

Thanks!

Answer 1

One approach would be to dump variables via save() to a shared location and have other read those in via load() -- it has the added benefits of compression and fast read/write operations for binary modes.

You can of course also serialize to file or a database. Or, if you must, even to human-readable files but those will be the slowest to be read back in.

Edit As per comments, here is how to change file modes post-save:

R> foo <- 1:3
R> save(foo, file="/tmp/SimpleDemo.RData")
R> Sys.chmod("/tmp/SimpleDemo.RData", mode="0444")
R> system("ls -l /tmp/SimpleDemo.RData")
-r--r--r-- 1 edd edd 62 2011-08-15 16:26 /tmp/SimpleDemo.RData