error writing/appending via staging on windows server

[m-muecke]

I'm getting an error when running DBI::dbWriteTable() or DBI::dbAppendTable() via the staging approach when running on a Windows server.
I assume it's due to missing normalization in the path.

Session info

─ Session info ──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
 setting  value
 version  R version 4.2.2 (2022-10-31 ucrt)
 os       Windows Server x64 (build 20348)
 system   x86_64, mingw32
 ui       RStudio
 language (EN)
 collate  English_United States.utf8
 ctype    English_United States.utf8
 tz       Europe/Berlin
 date     2025-12-04
 rstudio  2023.06.2+561 Mountain Hydrangea (desktop)
 pandoc   NA

─ Packages ──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
 package     * version date (UTC) lib source
 arrow       * 22.0.0  2025-10-29 [1] RSPM (R 4.2.0)
 assertthat    0.2.1   2019-03-21 [1] RSPM (R 4.2.0)
 bit           4.6.0   2025-03-06 [2] CRAN (R 4.2.2)
 bit64         4.6.0-1 2025-01-16 [2] CRAN (R 4.2.2)
 brickster     0.2.9   2025-09-04 [1] RSPM (R 4.2.0)
 cli           3.6.2   2023-12-11 [2] CRAN (R 4.2.3)
 crayon        1.5.3   2024-06-20 [2] CRAN (R 4.2.2)
 curl          6.4.0   2025-06-22 [2] CRAN (R 4.2.2)
 DBI           1.2.2   2024-02-16 [2] CRAN (R 4.2.3)
 dbplyr        2.5.1   2025-09-10 [1] RSPM (R 4.2.0)
 dplyr         1.1.4   2023-11-17 [2] CRAN (R 4.2.3)
 fansi         1.0.6   2023-12-08 [2] CRAN (R 4.2.3)
 generics      0.1.3   2022-07-05 [2] CRAN (R 4.2.3)
 glue          1.7.0   2024-01-09 [2] CRAN (R 4.2.3)
 httr2         1.2.0   2025-07-13 [2] RSPM (R 4.2.0)
 jsonlite      1.8.8   2023-12-04 [2] CRAN (R 4.2.3)
 lifecycle     1.0.4   2023-11-07 [2] CRAN (R 4.2.3)
 magrittr      2.0.3   2022-03-30 [2] CRAN (R 4.2.3)
 pillar        1.9.0   2023-03-22 [2] CRAN (R 4.2.3)
 pkgconfig     2.0.3   2019-09-22 [2] CRAN (R 4.2.3)
 purrr         1.0.2   2023-08-10 [2] CRAN (R 4.2.3)
 R6            2.5.1   2021-08-19 [2] CRAN (R 4.2.3)
 rappdirs      0.3.3   2021-01-31 [2] CRAN (R 4.2.3)
 rlang         1.1.3   2024-01-10 [2] CRAN (R 4.2.3)
 rstudioapi    0.16.0  2024-03-24 [2] CRAN (R 4.2.3)
 sessioninfo   1.2.2   2021-12-06 [2] CRAN (R 4.2.3)
 tibble        3.2.1   2023-03-20 [2] CRAN (R 4.2.3)
 tidyselect    1.2.1   2024-03-11 [1] RSPM (R 4.2.0)
 tzdb          0.5.0   2025-03-15 [2] RSPM (R 4.2.0)
 utf8          1.2.4   2023-10-22 [2] CRAN (R 4.2.3)
 vctrs         0.6.5   2023-12-01 [2] CRAN (R 4.2.3)

 [1] C:/Users/TMAXIMUEC/Downloads
 [2] D:/Application/R/R-4.2.2/library

────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────

[jmuhlenkamp]

+1 on this issue, I've seen it too but have not collected a min reprex yet.

[zacdav-db]

@m-muecke @jmuhlenkamp thanks for raising, do you experience this 100% of the time?

[m-muecke]

On the windows server yes, but I didn't get the error on a local windows machine. I've opened a PR that solved the issue for me.

[zacdav-db]

My concern currently is that this isn't necessarily specific to the DBI implementation/code path.

Can you see if you observe the same issues with db_volume_* functions (e.g. db_volume_upload_dir). I want to understand if this requires a systemic change rather than an isolated case.

[zacdav-db]

@m-muecke can you please try #141 on the windows server and on windows locally?

I've taken this issue as an opportunity to adopt {fs}, which to my undestanding, should be platform agnostic?

[m-muecke]

The issue arrived from tempdir() since on Windows this will return with \\ instead of /, I've gotten the same issue on the local machine with the paths, see below but somehow the sub call runs without errors on local windows machine and error on the windows server. But on the local machine it's the same bug since it won't get the relative path

[zacdav-db]

#141 should be using fs::path(fs::path_temp(), temp_dirname) now (ref)

[m-muecke]

I've tested your feature branch on local windows and windows server and it fixed the issue using the DBI functions and also checked that the path normalization works as expected.

[zacdav-db]

Wonderful, appreciate your help testing that. I will go ahead and merge 😄.