[R] for help!

Ott Toomet otoomet at econ.dk
Thu Dec 5 09:54:06 CET 2002


Hi,

In general, there are no clear upper limit on how big datasets R can
handle.  If you have a 32-bit computer, that is probably 2GB, but it
can be lowered.  

In which form do you have your data and how did you try to read it?
If it is an ASCII table, scan() should be much more memory efficient
than read.table().  You may also consider pre-processing your dataset
with e.g. perl in order to get rid of much what you do not need.  The
best (but not trivial) way is perhaps to read the data into a SQL
database and user R to query only necessary variables from there.

Perhaps you should start with a small subset of your data, try to read
it into R and do some exploratory analysis.  

Otherwise, SAS is known for its ability to handle large datasets.

Perhaps it helps.

Ott

 | From: jbwu <jbwu at pangea.stanford.edu>
 | Date: Wed, 04 Dec 2002 13:59:32 -0800
 | 
 | hi, Guys:
 | Now I am trying to use "R" to do some canonical analysis on large data sets,
 | one of them is 42MB, and can be read by "R", the other data file is about 90MB,
 | and this time R cannot read such a big size data. My question is that how can
 | I deal with such a big dataset with "R", or are there any other statistical 
 | softwares
 | which can read a huge data file as I memtioned?




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