[R] Data storage in R vs. S

[Brahm, David]

Hi,

   Another newbie question; I only just now downloaded and tried the R
software.  My big initial objection is the way R stores the entire working
database in one file between sessions.  In S, I have always stored many
large parallel objects in a database (e.g. stock-by-date matrices of close,
high, low, volume, ...), knowing that S would only read the one or two files
I wanted to work with at any given time.  Also, I'd attach and detach many
different databases (e.g. one per year's worth of data).  I don't think R
can handle that, and I'd guess that scanning a lot of ASCII files each time
would be slow.  Can anybody share their experience with large datasets?  Are
the developers of R planning to eventually change the way data is stored to
be more like S?

 -- David Brahm
    Fidelity Investments
    (617)563-7438


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