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rdplyrr-dbi

can't write timestamps in PostgreSQL using RPostgres dbWriteTable

I'm trying to write an R tibble object (or data.frame) into a Postgres database using the RPostgres package. Following the documentation, I'm trying to use the dbWriteTable function.

However, I realized that there's no specification of field.types in the method. Here I provide a minimal example where you can see the method failing when the input has a POSIXct timestamp (and passing when the timestamp is interpreted as a character). 

library(dplyr)
library(DBI)
library(RPostgres)
library(tibble)

conn <- dbConnect(RPostgres::Postgres(),
  host = url$host,
  port = url$port,
  dbname = url$dbname,
  user = url$user,
  password = url$password
)

test <- tibble(
  words = c("hallo","ja", "nein"),
  value = c(3,4,5),
  time= as.POSIXct(c("2016-05-04 04:32","2016-06-02 09:37","2016-07-12 10:43")))
test2 <- tibble(
  words = c("hallo","ja", "nein"),
  value = c(3,4,5),
  time= c("2016-05-04 04:32","2016-06-02 09:37","2016-07-12 10:43"))

dbWriteTable(conn = conn, name = "words", value = test)
> Error in eval(substitute(expr), envir, enclos) :
> ERROR:  invalid input syntax for type real: "2016-05-04 04:32:00"
> CONTEXT:  COPY words, line 1, column time: "2016-05-04 04:32:00"

dbWriteTable(conn = conn, name = "words2", value = test2)
> [1] TRUE

Does anyone know of a better way to write a table with timestamps in Postgres using R?

Solution

  • Using PostgreSQL driver in the RPostgreSQL package works. Also, the format of the third timestamp does not match default for as.POSIXct - too many digits for hour. So I changed "2016-07-12 010:43" to "2016-07-12 10:43" and you should find it works fine.

    library(dplyr)
library(DBI)
library(RPostgreSQL)
library(tibble)

#connect to db    
url <- list(user="postgres",password="postgres",dbname="test")

conn <- dbConnect(drv="PostgreSQL", user=url$user, password=url$password, dbname = url$dbname)


test <- tibble(
  words = c("hallo","ja", "nein"),
  value = c(3,4,5),
  time= as.POSIXct(c("2016-05-04 04:32","2016-06-02 09:37","2016-07-12 10:43")))
test2 <- tibble(
  words = c("hallo","ja", "nein"),
  value = c(3,4,5),
  time= c("2016-05-04 04:32","2016-06-02 09:37","2016-07-12 010:43"))


dbWriteTable(conn = conn, name = "words", value = test)

    [1] TRUE

    dbWriteTable(conn = conn, name = "words2", value = test2)

    [1] TRUE

    dbDisconnect(conn)