Documentation of differences between RMariaDB and RMySQL regarding data types?

[florian-speer]

Hi, my team is currently trying to migrate from RMySQL to RMariaDB. For the biggest part it's working well, but we do have some trouble regarding the differences both packages have regarding the translation of MySQL data types to R data types. For example, MySQL DATETIME is loaded by RMySQL as character and by RMariaDB as POSIXct. These changes are totally reasonable, but currently our only way of noticing them is when errors are thrown on downstream function calls. I tried to find some documentation that covers these differences but couldn't find anything. Does something like this exists or would it be possible to create it?

[krlmlr]

Thanks. I'm not aware of a list of differences.

There are only so many data types to consider, and I'd expect most to be unchanged. What would you expect this document to look like?

A good data source for testing/exploring is perhaps https://relational-data.org/, it's a publicly accessible MariaDB database with a lot of real and synthetic data.

[florian-speer]

I think a list of the following form would be great to have:

MySQL    | RMySQL    | RMariaDB
DATETIME | character | POSIXct
BIGINT   | numeric   | integer64 

Thanks for the database hint, maybe I can use it for testing