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tomroh / bcputility

R package for fast bulk imports/exports from/to SQL Server with the bcp command line utility
https://bcputility.roh.engineering
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Quick Start Info #30

Open cbailiss opened 4 days ago

cbailiss commented 4 days ago

Thanks for the package. Very useful to overcome the inherent limitations of RBAR in DBI.

Is there some quick start info somewhere for the package? The README dives right into benchmarks with some (relatively speaking) quite complicated examples. I work with some less experienced analysts who would really appreciate a less steep intro to the package - in the form of some minimal/basic examples in a new section before the benchmarks in the README, e.g. that show how to load one basic CSV file into a SQL Server table.

Also, a few bullet points on pre-requisites that need to be installed would be helpful as those from an R background find it difficult to work out which bits of Microsoft tooling/drivers need to be installed to use the package.

I hope the above doesn't appear overly critical - I think the package is great and with a little bit of additional info in the README it would be more accessible to a larger number of people.

tomroh commented 4 days ago

@cbailiss thanks for the feedback. I'll add in a simple usage section.

For the Windows/tooling, I do have a link link in the readme for installation. Do you have a couple examples of what is confusing? If someone has already used the DBI package in R, they already understand the odbc driver setup and then they would only need to install bcp. The installation section does cover pointing to those binaries for the package to function.

cbailiss commented 3 days ago

Thanks for the very quick response. You are correct of course that the top part of the README has a link to the Microsoft bcp page and mentions the ODC driver (but is this strictly needed to run the package? i.e. bcp is a command line tool so in theory you don't need the ODBC driver to use bcp - but the package internally might need it for something it does?).

I was ideally looking for slightly more direct guidance, e.g.

Prerequisites

Microsoft bcp tool installed and on system search path

Optional

Microsoft ODBC driver (link...) - needed for running benchmarks and needed for querying SQL Server generally, but not needed for using the bcputility package