R: Matching two tables on multiple columns and creating a matched/not matched flag - sql

Question

I'm a beginner to R from a SAS background trying to do a basic "case when" match on two tables to get a flag where I have and have not found a match. Please see the SAS code I have in mind below. I just need something analogous to this in R. Thanks in advance.
proc sql;
create table
x as
select
a.*,
b.*,
case when a.first_column=b.column_first and
a.second_column=b.column_second
then 1 else 0 end as matched_flag
from table1 as a
left join
table2 as b
on a.first_column=b.column_first and a.second_column=b.column_second;
quit;

Answer 1

I'm not familiar with SAS, but I think I understand what you are trying to do. To see how many rows/columns are similar between two tables, you can use %in% and the length function.
For example, initialize two matrices of different dimensions and given them similar row names and column names:
mat.a <- matrix(1, nrow=3, ncol = 2)
mat.b <- matrix(1, nrow=2, ncol = 3)
rownames(mat.a) <- c('a','b','c')
rownames(mat.b) <- c('a','d')
colnames(mat.a) <- c('g','h')
colnames(mat.b) <- c('h','i')
mat.a and mat.b now exist with different row and column names. To match the rows by names, you can use:
row.match <- rownames(mat.a)[rownames(mat.a) %in% rownames(mat.b)]
num.row.match <- length(row.match)
Note that row.match can now be used to index into both of the matrices. The %in% operator returns a logical of the same length of the first argument (in this case, rownames(mat.a)) that indicates if the ith element of the first argument was found anywhere in the elements of the second argument. This nature of %in% means that you have to be sensitive to how you order the arguments for your indexing.
If you simply want to quantify how many rows or columns are the same between the two matrices, then you can use the sum function with the %in% operator:
sum(rownames(mat.a) %in% rownames(mat.b))
With the sum function used like this, you do not need to be sensitive to how you order the arguments, because the number of row names of mat.a in row names of mat.b is equivalent to the number of row names of mat.b in row names of mat.a. That is to say that this usage of %in% is commutative.
I hope this helps!

Answer 2

You will want to use dataframe objects. These are like datasets in SAS. You can use bind to put two dataframe objects together side by side. Then you can select rows based on conditions and set the flag based on this. In the code below you will see that I did this twice: once to set the 1 flag and once to set the 0 flag.
To select the rows where all fields match you can do something similar, but instead of assigning a new column you can assign all the results back to the name of the table you are working on.
Here's the code:
# make up example a and b data frames
table1 <- data.frame(list(a.first_column=c(1,2,3),a.second_column=c(4,5,6)))
table2 <- data.frame(list(b.first_column=c(1,3,6),b.second_column=c(4,5,9)))
# Combine columns (horizontally)
x <- cbind(table1, table2)
print("Combined Data Frames")
print(x)
# create matched flag (1 when the first columns match)
x$matched_flag[x$a.first_column==x$b.first_column] <- 1
x$matched_flag[!x$a.first_column==x$b.first_column] <- 0
# only select records that match both data frames
x <- x[x$a.first_column==x$b.first_column & x$a.second_column==x$b.second_column,]
print("Matched Data Frames")
print(x)
BTW: since you are used to using SQL, you might want to try the sqldf package in R. It will let you use the same techniques that you are used to but in R and on data frames.