[R] advice requested re: building "good" system (R, SQL db) for handling large datasets

[Jeffrey Horner]

Richard Pearson wrote on 02/06/2008 06:25 AM:
> Hi Thomas
[...]
> With databases, one issue that might be relevant is whether you want to 
> store data in tables (e.g. one table to store one data.frame) that can 
> subsequently be manipulated in the DB, or to store R objects as R 
> objects (e.g. as BLOBs). My situation is likely to be the later case, 
> and one of my concerns is that many DBs have an upper limit of 2GB on 
> BLOBs, and I might potentially have objects that are larger than this.
[...]

I'd be curious as to why you'd want to store and retrieve R objects from 
a BLOB column in a table. I've often thought about this, but 
unfortunately neither the DBI package nor the RODBC package support this.

Jeff
-- 
http://biostat.mc.vanderbilt.edu/JeffreyHorner