I look at one use of R for DBAs:
I have a client data warehouse which holds daily rollups of revenue and cost for customers. We’ve had some issues with the warehouse lately where data was not getting loaded due to system errors and timeouts, and our services team gave me a list of some customers who had gaps in their data due to persistent processing failures. I figured out the root cause behind this (which will show up as tomorrow’s post), but I wanted to make sure that we filled in all of the gaps.
My obvious solution is to write a T-SQL query, getting some basic information by day for each customer. I could scan through that result set, but the problem is that people aren’t great at reading tables of numbers; they do much better looking at pictures. This is where R comes into play.
Click through for the code and a walkthrough of what each line is doing.