Re: state of the art in org-mode tables e.g. join, etc

[Tim Cross <theophilusx@gmail.com>]

Greg Minshall <minshall@umich.edu> writes:

> John,
>
>> Is there a state of the art in using org-tables as little databases
>> with joins and stuff?
>
> i have to admit i do all that with an R code source block.  (the dplyr
> package has the relevant joins, e.g. dplyr::inner_join().)  and, in R,
> ":colnames yes" as a header argument gives you header lines on results.
> (maybe that's ?now? for "all" languages?)
>

For really complex joins and ad hoc queries, I would do similar or put
the data into sqlite. For more simple ones, I just define a table which
uses table formulas to extract the values from the other tables - the
downside being the tables need to have the same data ordering or the
formulas need to be somewhat complex. Provided the tables have the same
number of records in the same order, table formulas are usually fairly
easy.

I did think about writing some elisp functions to use in my table
formulas to make things easier, but then decided I was just re-inventing
and well defined database solution and figured when I need it, just use
sqlite. However, it has been a while since I needed this level of
complexity, so perhaps things have moved on and there are better ways
now.

--
Tim Cross