Undocumented behavior of ore.make.names() function in Oracle R Enterprise

While working with some data in Hive recently using the Oracle R Connectors for Hadoop (ORCH), I tried to use the ore.make.names function (of package OREbase ). The function creates valid column names for ore.frame objects. Here is a reproducible example, copied straight from the function documentation:

> library(ORCH)
> xnames <- c("col1", "Col.2", "COL_3", "col 4", "col1",
"L_A_S_T C.O.L.U.M.N abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz")
> ore.make.names(xnames)
Error in ore.make.names(xnames) : attempt to apply non-function

Experimenting a little, I discovered that ore.make.names becomes functional after executing ore.connect. Indeed, using Hive:

> ore.connect(type="HIVE")
> ore.make.names(xnames)
[1] "col1"
[2] "col_2"
[3] "col_3"
[4] "col_4"
[5] "col1_1"
[6] "l_a_s_t_c_o_l_u_m_n_abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz"

Such a behavior (i.e. the requirement for a prior call to ore.connect ) is not mentioned in the function documentation.

Furthermore, if we disconnect from the database and try to run ore.make.names, we get again an error message, albeit a different one this time:

> ore.disconnect()
> ore.make.names(xnames)
Error: '$' is not implemented yet'.ore.QueryEnv' is not implemented yet'makeDBnames' is not implemented yet

I posted a question in the Oracle R Technologies forum, where it was confirmed that the incorrect error messages have been logged as a bug, and that in future releases an appropriate error message will be returned, indicating that a connection via ore.connect is required.

> sessionInfo()  # runs in Oracle BD Lite VM 4.0.1
Oracle Distribution of R version 3.1.1 (--)
Platform: x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu (64-bit)
[...]
other attached packages:
[1] ORCH_2.4.1 ORCHstats_2.4.1 ORCHcore_2.4.1 OREstats_1.4.1
[5] MASS_7.3-33 OREbase_1.4.1

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Christos - Iraklis Tsatsoulis

Christos - Iraklis is one of our resident Data Scientists. He holds advanced graduate degrees in applied mathematics, engineering, and computing. He has been awarded both Chartered Engineer and Chartered Manager status in the UK, as well as Master status in Kaggle.com due to "consistent and stellar results" in predictive analytics contests.

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