Analyze Oracle Financials Cloud Data in R via ODBC

Access Oracle Financials Cloud data with pure R script and standard SQL. You can use the CData ODBC Driver for Oracle Financials Cloud and the RODBC package to work with remote Oracle Financials Cloud data in R. By using the CData Driver, you are leveraging a driver written for industry-proven standards to access your data in the popular, open-source R language. This article shows how to use the driver to execute SQL queries to Oracle Financials Cloud data and visualize Oracle Financials Cloud data in R.

Install R

You can complement the driver's performance gains from multi-threading and managed code by running the multithreaded Microsoft R Open or by running R linked with the BLAS/LAPACK libraries. This article uses Microsoft R Open (MRO).

Connect to Oracle Financials Cloud as an ODBC Data Source

Information for connecting to Oracle Financials Cloud follows, along with different instructions for configuring a DSN in Windows and Linux environments.

Using Basic Authentication

You must set the following to authenticate to Oracle ERP:

• Url: The Url of the account to connect to. Typically, the URL of your Oracle Cloud service. For example, https://servername.fa.us2.oraclecloud.com.
• User: The username of your account.
• Password: The password of your account.

When you configure the DSN, you may also want to set the Max Rows connection property. This will limit the number of rows returned, which is especially helpful for improving performance when designing reports and visualizations.

Windows

If you have not already, first specify connection properties in an ODBC DSN (data source name). This is the last step of the driver installation. You can use the Microsoft ODBC Data Source Administrator to create and configure ODBC DSNs.

Linux

If you are installing the CData ODBC Driver for Oracle Financials Cloud in a Linux environment, the driver installation predefines a system DSN. You can modify the DSN by editing the system data sources file (/etc/odbc.ini) and defining the required connection properties.

/etc/odbc.ini

[CData OracleERP Source]
Driver = CData ODBC Driver for Oracle Financials Cloud
Description = My Description
Url = https://abc.oraclecloud.com
User = user
Password = password

For specific information on using these configuration files, please refer to the help documentation (installed and found online).

Load the RODBC Package

To use the driver, download the RODBC package. In RStudio, click Tools -> Install Packages and enter RODBC in the Packages box.

After installing the RODBC package, the following line loads the package:

library(RODBC)

Note: This article uses RODBC version 1.3-12. Using Microsoft R Open, you can test with the same version, using the checkpoint capabilities of Microsoft's MRAN repository. The checkpoint command enables you to install packages from a snapshot of the CRAN repository, hosted on the MRAN repository. The snapshot taken Jan. 1, 2016 contains version 1.3-12.

library(checkpoint)
checkpoint("2016-01-01")

Connect to Oracle Financials Cloud Data as an ODBC Data Source

You can connect to a DSN in R with the following line:

conn <- odbcConnect("CData OracleERP Source")

Schema Discovery

The driver models Oracle Financials Cloud APIs as relational tables, views, and stored procedures. Use the following line to retrieve the list of tables:

sqlTables(conn)

Execute SQL Queries

Use the sqlQuery function to execute any SQL query supported by the Oracle Financials Cloud API.

invoices <- sqlQuery(conn, "SELECT InvoiceId, Amount FROM Invoices WHERE Supplier = 'CData Software'", believeNRows=FALSE, rows_at_time=1)

You can view the results in a data viewer window with the following command:

View(invoices)

Plot Oracle Financials Cloud Data

You can now analyze Oracle Financials Cloud data with any of the data visualization packages available in the CRAN repository. You can create simple bar plots with the built-in bar plot function:

par(las=2,ps=10,mar=c(5,15,4,2))
barplot(invoices$Amount, main="Oracle Financials Cloud Invoices", names.arg = invoices$InvoiceId, horiz=TRUE)

👁 A basic bar plot. (Salesforce is shown.)