foreach %dopar% + RPostgreSQL

Question

I am using RPostgreSQL to connect to a local database. The setup works just fine on my Linux machine. R 2.11.1, Postgres 8.4. I was playing with the 'foreach' with the multicore (doMC) parallel backend to wrap some repetitive queries (numbering a few thousand) and appending the results into a data structure. Curiously enough, it works if I use %do% but fails when I switch to %dopar%, with the exception when there is only one iteration (as shown below) I wondered whether it had something to do with a single connection object, so I created 10 connection objects and depending on what 'i' was, a certain con object was given for that query, depending on i modulo 10. (indicated below by just 2 connection objects). The expression which is evaluated eval(expr.01), contains/is the query which depends on what 'i' is. I can't make sense of these particular error messages. I am wondering whether there is any way to make this work. Thanks. Vishal Belsare R snippet follows: ``` > id.qed2.foreach <-…

Accepted Answer

The following works and speeds up by ~ 1.5x over a sequential form. As a next step, I am wondering whether it is possible to attach a connection object to each of the workers spawned by registerDoMC. If so, then there would be no need to create/destroy the connection objects, which prevents from overwhelming the PostgreSQL server with connections.

```
pgparquery <- function(i) {
drv <- dbDriver("PostgreSQL"); 
con <- dbConnect(drv, dbname='nsdq'); 
lst <- eval(expr.01); #contains the SQL query which depends on 'i'
qry <- dbSendQuery(con,lst);
tmp <- fetch(qry,n=-1);
dt <- dates.qed2[i]
dbDisconnect(con);
result <- list(date=dt, idreuters=tmp$idreuters)
return(result)}

id.qed.foreach <- foreach(i = 1588:3638, .inorder=FALSE, .packages=c("DBI", "RPostgreSQL")) %dopar% {pgparquery(i)}
```

-- Vishal Belsare

foreach %dopar% + RPostgreSQL

Solution

Problem