[R] Can R handle medium and large size data sets?

[Gueorgui Kolev]

Dear R experts,

Is it true that R generally cannot handle  medium sized data sets(a
couple of hundreds of thousands observations) and threrefore large
date set(couple of millions of observations)?

I googled and I found lots of questions regarding this issue, but
curiously there were no straightforward answers what can be done to
make R capable of handling data.

Is there sth inherent in the structure of R that makes it impossible
to work with say 100 000observations and more? If it is so, is there
any hope that R can be fixed in the future?

My experience is rather limited---I tried to load a Stata data set of
about 150000observations(which Stata handles instantly) using the
library "foreign". After half an hour R was still "thinking" so I
stopped the attempts.

Thank you in advance,

Gueorgui Kolev

Department of Economics and Business
Universitat Pompeu Fabra