The post below is a collection of useful (but kind of random) thoughts about R and SQL. It should serve more like a starting point, rather than exhaustive discussion of the presented topics. Note that it mostly describes SQLite - many concepts will be similar for different databases, but they might not be identical. You’ve been warned! R, SQL, dbplyr and ORM When we are talking about accessing SQL from a programming language, it is good to know a little bit about an ORM concept.