Matlab connections

[allen glazner]

It would be useful to include a live Matlab data connection like the one for R that was demonstrated in the webinar today.

[david]

First question.  Do you use the table data structure in matlab?  For example, if you have two columns A = [1:5] and B=A+4, and you want to save a table with these two columns do you use a data structure Table = …. which you want to save with something like

Table = table(A,B);
writeDTable(“/tmp/table”,Table)

 

[allen glazner]

I generally do not use tables because they are a little clunky in Matlab, but could.

[david]

No need to switch to the Table structure. I did some search on what matlab has that corresponds to a dataframe in R.  This structure does not exist in Octave, and I don’t have a matlab license.

There is a way to export data from a matlab workspace and import it into DataGraph.  Currently, if you have lists A,B in your workspace you should be able to do

save -v4 outputfile.mat

and then drag that file into DataGraph to import it.  That however does not allow you the same functionality as the R interface, namely automatic updates, table with varying types etc.

The .dtable and .dtbin file formats are really just a collection of variables, and a table is broken down into a few lists and labels that have specific names.  So the main question is how you view your data.  For example, if you typically just want to save two columns to a file it will be easy for me to write a function like

writetable(filename,’column name 1′,data1,’column name 2′,data2)

The Table structure seemed like a relatively simple data type, too bad that it is clunky and hasn’t been implemented in octave.  That might be related.

Any concrete cases?  I can make some educated guesses, but a specific use case is always preferrable.