INSTALLING FROM CRAN sqldf is installed from CRAN like this: install.packages("sqldf") This will download and install sqldf and all its dependencies including the RSQLite driver. The RSQLite driver includes SQLite itself so the single line given above is all that is needed to install everything you need. INSTALLING FROM GITHUB The development version of sqldf can be installed from github like this: library(devtools) install_github("ggrothendieck/sqldf") BACKENDS sqldf can also be used with alternate backends: H2, PostgreSQL and MySQL. H2 is the next easiest to install since the H2 software itself is included right in the RH2 R package providing the driver. Just install RH2 (which in turn requires that you install java). See FAQ #12 on the sqldf github home page for information on installng and using PostgreSQL with sqldf. https://github.com/ggrothendieck/sqldf PROBLEMS sqldf uses gsubfn which can optionally use the R tcltk package but can also run without that package substituting R code for it. On Windows and most other R installations, the tcltk package comes with the core of R and so you automatically have it intalled it when you install R itself. If the tcltk package is not present this fact will be automatically detected and it will automatically switch to R code. There have been reports of bad R builds in which R reports that it has tcltk capability even though it is missing. In that case you will get an error message about tcltk being missing. To address this issue it is easiest to just run this command prior to sqldf to force gsubfn to use R code in place of tcltk: options(gsubfn.engine = "R") See FAQ #5 on the sqldf github home page for more info. https://github.com/ggrothendieck/sqldf MORE INFO There is more information on sqldf on the sqldf github home page. Note the TROUBLESHOOTING, FAQs and EXAMPLES sections there. https://github.com/ggrothendieck/sqldf There is also information in the help files: library(help = sqldf) ?sqldf ?read.csv.sql There is also info on the individual driver packages here: http://cran.r-project.org/package=RSQLite http://cran.r-project.org/package=RH2 http://cran.r-project.org/package=RPostgreSQL http://cran.r-project.org/package=RMySQL