Publications by Michael J Bommarito II

Connecting R to an Oracle database with RJDBC

22.11.2012

In many circumstances, you might want to connect R directly to a database to store and retrieve data.  If the source database is an Oracle database, you have a number of options: ROracle RODBC RJDBC   Using ROracle should theoretically provide you with the best performing client, as this library is a wrapper around the Oracle OCI driver.  Th...

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Revisiting text processing with R and Python

25.05.2013

  Back in 2011, I covered the relative performance difference of the most popular libraries for text processing in R and Python.   In case you can’t guess the answer, Python and NLTK  won by a significant margin over R and tm.  Text processing with R seemed simple on paper, but performance and flexibility limitations have kept me away sinc...

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Plotting Oracle RMAN backup durations with R

03.06.2013

  How long does your Oracle RMAN backup take to complete?  How does this vary over time?  Are there patterns by week, week of month, or day of week?   The gist below can help you evaluate questions like these.  If you’re interested in using R with Oracle more generally, check out this previous post on connecting R to an Oracle database wit...

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Plotting average read and write operation size by ASM disk for Oracle

12.06.2013

  Throughput, throughput, throughput – for many databases, this is the performance measure of importance.  When you are working with a fixed number of IOPS but see mixed workload types, system health can be assessed through the average read and write operation size.  In an ASM environment, we can query this information by ASM disk from gv$as...

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Is the Tax Code the longest Title?

19.08.2013

  Last week, I shared that Dan Katz and I had finally published a draft of our paper, Measuring the Complexity of the Law: The U.S. Code.  We’d previewed this research on Computational Legal Studies years ago.  Since then, we’ve received great feedback and a number of questions.   The most common question, even among legal professionals...

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ipython notebook for R: Quickstart for Ubuntu

27.10.2013

If you’re like me, you love ipython notebook but often write R.  RStudio’s integrated RMarkdown is nice, but for some contexts like quick demos or basic training, a browser-based interface is unbeatable.  What if we could get the best of both worlds – an ipython notebook for R? The answer is rNotebook, and if you haven’t seen it yet, ta...

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