10. Databases and APIs

Published

Tuesday, October 28, 2025

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 and demos.

Assignment

This week’s assignment. The assignment has some more reading, and asks you to make a small project using the tidycensus package and the Census API.

Slides