Step 1: Establish a connection

The first step to import data from a SQL database is creating a connection to it. As Filip explained, you need different packages depending on the database you want to connect to. All these package do this in a uniform way, as specified in the DBI package.

dbConnect() creates a connection between your R session and a SQL database. The first argument has to be a DBIdriver object, that specifies how connections are made and how data is mapped between R and the database. Specifically for MySQL databases, you can build such a driver with RMySQL::MySQL().

If the MySQL database is a remote database hosted on a server, you'll also have to specify the following arguments in dbConnect(): dbname, host, port, user and password. Most of these details have already been provided.

Load the DBI library, which is already installed on DataCamp's servers.
Edit the dbConnect() call to connect to the MySQL database. Change the port argument (3306) and user argument ("student").
Print con to the console.

Exercise

Step 1: Establish a connection

Instructions