FAQ - How to connect to DSE 5.0 from R using the Simba driver

Overview

This article provides instructions on how to connect from R to a DataStax Enterprise cluster.

Applies to

• DataStax Enterprise 5.0.x

Background

With the growing popularity of the R programming language, there is also an increasing demand from the field to be able to use R to query data in Cassandra.

DataStax Enterprise 5.1 now supports SparkR for R analytic processing. However for customers who are yet to upgrade to DSE 5.1, this article provides an alternative for connecting R to a DSE 5.0 cluster.

Prerequisites

• a running DSE Analytics cluster with Spark enabled
• Spark SQL Thrift Server running on one of the DSE Analytics nodes

Procedure

Follow these steps to setup your R environment.

Step 1 - Download the Simba JDBC Driver from the DataStax Drivers Download page and unpack it on the machine where R is installed.

Step 2 - Add SparkJDBC41.jar and the rest of the JAR files (from step 1) to the classpath.

Step 3 - Add the JDBC driver class com.simba.spark.jdbc41.Driver.

Step 4 - Set the connection URL using the host and port (default 10000) where the Spark SQL Thrift Server is running in your DSE cluster, for example jdbc:spark://10.1.2.3:10000.

Here is an example of a connection configured in R:

library(RJDBC)
drv <- JDBC("com.simba.spark.jdbc41.Driver",  "/path/to/SparkJDBC41.jar") 
conn <- dbConnect(drv, "jdbc:spark://10.1.2.3:10000", "user", "password")

NOTE - Details of how to configure your R environment depends on the distribution installed. Consult the documentation appropriate for your R distribution.

For more information about the Simba driver, see the documentation included in the driver download in step 1.