I am attempting to analyze some data in RStudio which originates from a MySQL database, so I used dbConnect to connect to said database, and copied the single table I needed for this project. I then used R to clean the data a bit, getting rid of some un-needed columns. So far, so good.
My problems arose when I realized my data had some outliers, and I needed to delete rows which contained obvious outlier data. This is something I have no problem doing in SQL, but lack the R experience to do effectively. So I looked into it, and found out about sqldf, a package which bills itself as a way to use SQL commands to manipulate data.frames. Perfect! But I'm having some trouble with this, as sqldf seems to require a database connection of some kind. Is there a way to simply connect to a data.frame I have in my global environment in RStudio?
Q: Couldn't you just manipulate the data in MySQL before importing it to R?
A: Yes, and that's what I'll do if I have to, but I'd like to understand sqldf better.