I'm a SQLServer DBA and in the new version of this tool, there are new features to integrate R scripts and use it easily with the DB objects. That sounds cool.But to use that, we have to know a little bit about stats and data mining.And it's quite hard to find friendly and readable documentation for newbies like me. So, I will ask for some best-practice about clustering.I have a dataset with few hundreds records and with 5 features, both categorical and numerical.Regarding categorical data, I have a few basic questions :how can I manage categorical data ? what I understood from articles found is that I can transform categorical data in boolean and pivoting it. If a have a column with categorical data (for instance with values 'a' or 'b'), creating to new columns like column_a and column_b with value 0 or 1 ?should I always center / scale this new column ? 
Clustering : handling categorical data, should we pivot and scale?
r;clustering;k means