dbcturbo: High-Performance Streaming Reader for 'DATASUS' DBC Files

A modern, memory-efficient R package for reading and converting DBC files produced by the Brazilian Ministry of Health's 'DATASUS' system. DBC files are DBF databases compressed with the 'PKWare' implode algorithm. Unlike 'read.dbc', this package processes files in streaming mode, never loading the full dataset into RAM. It can export directly to CSV or DBF and provides R helpers for in-memory reading and Parquet conversion.

Version: 0.2.0
Depends: R (≥ 4.0.0)
Suggests: data.table (≥ 1.14.0), arrow (≥ 12.0.0), testthat (≥ 3.0.0), knitr, rmarkdown
Published: 2026-10-10
DOI: 10.32614/CRAN.package.dbcturbo (may not be active yet)
Author: Gumercindo Pimentel Peralta ORCID iD [aut, cre], Juliana da Silva ORCID iD [ths], Mark Adler [ctb] (Author of blast.c (PKWare implode decompressor)), Daniela Petruzalek [ctb] (Author of read.dbc, dbc2dbf.c), Pablo Fonseca [ctb] (Author of blast-dbf)
Maintainer: Gumercindo Pimentel Peralta <gumercindopimentel at gmail.com>
BugReports: https://github.com/GPimentel14/dbcturbo/issues
License: AGPL-3
URL: https://github.com/GPimentel14/dbcturbo
NeedsCompilation: yes
SystemRequirements: C99 compiler
Citation: dbcturbo citation info
Materials: README, NEWS
CRAN checks: dbcturbo results

Documentation:

Reference manual: dbcturbo.html , dbcturbo.pdf
Vignettes: dbcturbo: Fast and Efficient Reading of DATASUS DBC Files (source, R code)

Downloads:

Package source: dbcturbo_0.2.0.tar.gz
Windows binaries: r-devel: not available, r-release: not available, r-oldrel: not available
macOS binaries: r-release (arm64): dbcturbo_0.2.0.tgz, r-oldrel (arm64): dbcturbo_0.2.0.tgz, r-release (x86_64): dbcturbo_0.2.0.tgz, r-oldrel (x86_64): dbcturbo_0.2.0.tgz

Linking:

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