I use RODBC to send queries to an SQL-Server. Sometimes they take too much time to run, so I need to cancel them.
Clicking the red "stop" button in RStudio yields this error message:
R is not responding to your request to interrupt processing so to stop the current operation you may need to terminate R entirely.
Terminating R will cause your R session to immediately abort. Active computations will be interrupted and unsaved source file changes and workspace objects will be discarded.
Do you want to terminate R now?
And if I click yes my session is indeed terminated. (note: using Rgui instead of RStudio doesn't make things better)
However:
when I use another software (named "Query ExPlus") to connect to this same SQL-Server, I have a similar stop button, and clicking it instantly interrupts the query, without any crash.
when I connect to a PostgreSQL database using the RPostgres package I can also interrupt the query at any time.
These two points lead me to think that there should be a way to solve my problem. What can I do?
So far my workaround is:
library(RODBC)
library(R.utils)
withTimeout(mydf <- sqlQuery(myconnection, myquery), timeout=120)
Note: I don't have permission to kill queries from the database side.