[R] Reading of a large SAS Export dataset

[Prof Brian Ripley]

On Thu, 23 Aug 2001, Dr. Stephan Martin Rudolfer wrote:

> I am trying to read in a large SAS dataset (1706 observations, 72
> variables)  using the foreign package.
>
> R crashes, with the error message "This program has performed an
> illegal operation and will be shut down."  The details given include
> "RGUI caused an invalid page fault in module FOREIGN.DLL at
> 015f:14c327e7."
>
> Bearing in mind the statement on p.2 of the R Data Import/Export
> document, "In general, statistical systems like R are not
> particularly well suited to manipulations of large-scale data," I
> must reluctantly conclude that my dataset is too large to be
> handled by R.
>
> Confirmation of this would save me a lot of time spent in futile
> further attempts at achieving the impossible.

That's not a large data set: it would be with a million rows
(nad we have datasets that size).

Package foreign is somewhat fragile, but do you have the latest version
(which is not that in 1.3.0)?  Try update.packages(), as the previous tow
versions had serious memory-allocation bugs.  If the problem persists, try
the advice about dumping to a text file ....

-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272860 (secr)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595

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