Working with relational databases

Now that we have the data we need for the rest of the example, we're going to learn how to work with it using databases. In this section, we will learn how to save our data into a relational database, as well as how to read it back. We won't go too deep into advanced operations or workflows. We will only look into the basics, and this section may be skipped if you are not interested in this topic. It's not critical to know this to reproduce the rest of the example in the following chapters.

The first thing we must do is install the RMySQL package. There are various packages for working with databases, and they work almost the same. We chose the RMySQL package because it's designed for the MySQL database, which is very popular and easy to work with in almost all operating systems. To be able to reproduce this code, you will need a MySQL database set up properly in your computer, and we won't go into the details of how to do so here. You can find many good...