09. Databases and APIs

Published

Thursday, October 15, 2026

This week …

Working with data that’s nominally larger than the amount of RAM you have. Also talking programatically to computers that store way more data than you could fit on your computer.

Required Reading

  • Hadley Wickham, Garrett Grolemund, and Mine Çetinkaya-Rundel R for Data Science: Import, Tidy, Transform, Visualize, and Model Data, 2nd ed. (Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly Media, 2023), https://r4ds.hadley.nz.

Read the text online.. Take a look at Chapter 21 on databases. It uses a different database back-end from the one we’ll use in class, but the ideas are the same.

Examples

This week’s examples have some demonstrations of how to use the Census API via tidycensus. The tidycensus documentation and book has many more examples.

Assignment

This week’s assignment. The assignment has some more reading, and is a gentle introduction to relational data: working with several related tables from the nycflights23 package, identifying the keys that connect them, and joining them together.

Slides