Connections Pane

The Connections Pane allows you to explore database connections created within your R or Python sessions. It also includes basic support for storing and managing connection strings for future usage.

Opening a connection using R

To open a connection in Positron Connections Pane, you need to connect to a database using any package that supports the connections contract, such as odbc, sparklyr, bigrquery, and others.

The Positron Connections Pane implements RStudio’s connections contract; this means that any package that works within RStudio’s Connections Pane should work within the Positron Connections Pane.

Here is an example of how to open a connection using the connections package to open a SQLite connection:

tmp <- tempfile()
dir.create(tmp)
dbplyr::nycflights13_sqlite(path = tmp)
con <- connections::connection_open(RSQLite::SQLite(), file.path(tmp, "nycflights13.sqlite"))

You can also open an existing connection from the Variables Pane, as shown below for Python, and you can find more information about connecting to a specific database from Posit Solutions Engineering.

Opening a connection using Python

Currently we support connections created using the sqlite3 and SQLAlchemy modules. To open a connection in the Connections Pane, create a top level object that represents the connection/engine.

import sqlite3
conn = sqlite3.connect("nycflights13.sqlite")

You can then either use %connection_show conn to open the connection in the Connections Pane or click on the database icon that appears close to the object name in the Variables Pane.

Variables Pane showing a connection object

That will bring up the Connections Pane, allowing you to navigate the database.