In Intro to PL/R and R, we covered how to enable PL/R language in the database and wrote some PL/R functions
that rendered plain text reports using the R environment. What makes combining R and PostgreSQL in
PL/R most powerful is when you can start writing SQL summary queries that use R functions like any other SQL function.
In this next example, we'll be using PostGIS test runs from tests we autogenerated from the Official PostGIS documentation (Documentation Driven Testing (DDT))
as described in the Garden Test section of the PostGIS Developer wiki.
We've also updated some of our logging generator and test patterns so future results may not represent what we demonstrated in the last article.
On a side note: Among the changes in the tests was to introduce more variants of the Empty Geometry now supported by PostGIS 2.0.
Our beloved PostGIS 2.0 trunk is at the moment somewhat unstable when working with these new forms of emptiness and stuffing geometries in inappropriate places. At the moment it doesn't survive through the mindless machine gun battery of tests we have mercilessly inflicted.
It's been great fun trying to build a better dummy while watching Paul run around patching holes to make the software more dummy proof as the dummy stumbles across questionable but amusing PostGIS use cases not gracefully handled by his new serialization and empty logic.
On yet another side note, it's nice to
see that others are doing similar wonderful things with documentation. Check out Euler's comment on catalog tables
where he uses the PostgreSQL SGML documentation to autogenerate PostgreSQL catalog table comments using OpenJade's OSX to convert the SGML to XML and then XSL similar to what we did with PostGIS documentation to autogenerate PostGIS function/type comments and as a platform
for our test generator.
For our next exercises we'll be using the power of aggregation to push data into R instead of pg.spi.execute. This will make our functions far more reusable and versatile.
