tiledb
Modern Database Engine for Complex Data Based on Multi-Dimensional Arrays
The modern database 'TileDB' introduces a powerful on-disk format for storing and accessing any complex data based on multi-dimensional arrays. It supports dense and sparse arrays, dataframes and key-values stores, cloud storage ('S3', 'GCS', 'Azure'), chunked arrays, multiple compression, encryption and checksum filters, uses a fully multi-threaded implementation, supports parallel I/O, data versioning ('time travel'), metadata and groups. It is implemented as an embeddable cross-platform C++ library with APIs from several languages, and integrations. This package provides the R support.
The TileDB R package offers an R interface to the modern database by TileDB.
Documentation
Documentation is available for the R package as well as for the TileDB API.
Installation
TileDB Embedded needs to be present, and can be installed first (from a package or from source) for the TileDB R package to build and link correctly. Alternatively, if no system installation is found, a precompiled shared library is used during the installation of this R package.
The TileDB R package has been published on CRAN and be installed directly via
> install.packages("tiledb")
as usual.
The most recent released version can be installed from Github using the package remotes.
> if (!requireNamespace("remotes",quietly=TRUE)) install.packages("remotes")
> remotes::install_github("TileDB-Inc/TileDB-R")
...
> library(tiledb)
TileDB R 0.33.0 with TileDB Embedded 2.29.0 on Ubuntu 24.04.
See https://tiledb.com for more information about TileDB.
> help(package=tiledb)
If the TileDB library is installed in a custom location, you need to pass the explicit path:
> remotes::install_github("TileDB-Inc/TileDB-R",
args="--configure-args='--with-tiledb=/path/to/tiledb'")
Note that the TileDB R package is always developed and tested against the latest stable version of TileDB, but should also build against the newest development version.
Quick Links
Copyright
The TileDB R package is Copyright 2018-2025 TileDB, Inc
License
MIT