On-disk formats

R creates and stores data in memory. This means that, if the size of your dataset exceeds the amount of available memory, it will not be feasible to read and write the corresponding data.

There are, however, a few tools that can save and operate on data stored locally on disk using R. A few of them have been mentioned for reference:

Package

Use

bigmemory

Can store and manipulate massive matrices and create the big.matrix objects

bigtabulate

Used for table, tapply, and other operations on the big.matrix objects

biganalytics

Extends the big memory package and adds functionality such as large-scale k-means and other analytical functions

biglm

Used for generalized linear modeling on large datasets ...

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