The xml2relational package: Transforming NoSQL to relational data
Usually it is easier to work with data when you have them in a tabular, relational format. Often enough however, we only get the data in an object-oriented, NoSQL data format like XML or JSON. So there is a need to transform NoSQL data to something that is easier to work with. This is where my new package xml2relational comes into play. What xml2relational does xml2relational is designed to convert XML documents with nested object hierarchies into a set of R dataframes. These dataframes represent the different tables in a relational data model and are connected amongst each other by foreign keys. Essentially, xml2relational flattens an object-oriented data structure into a relational data structure. Once the relational structure is created (and that is basically a list of dataframes representing the different tables) you can export both the data model (as SQL CREATE statements) and the data (either as SQL INSERT statements or as CSV files) to get the data easily into a rel