How to stop a running query?

Question

I use RODBC to send queries to an SQL-Server. Sometimes they take too much time to run, so I need to cancel them.

Clicking the red \"stop\" button in RStudio yields this

Answer 1

I've just stumbled upon the odbc package. It allows to interrupt a query at any time.

Basic usage goes like this:

library(DBI)

myconnection <- dbConnect(odbc::odbc(),
                          driver = "SQL Server",
                          server = "my_server_IP_address",
                          database = "my_DB_name",
                          uid = "my_user_id",
                          pwd = "my_password")

dbGetQuery(myconnection, myquery)

I don't have a deep understanding of what happens behind the scenes, but for what I've seen so far in my personal use this package has other advantages over RODBC:

• really faster
• get the column types from the DB instead of guessing them (see here)
• no stringsAsFactors and as.is arguments necessary