I've recently stumbled across data.table, Matthew Dowle's package. I'm
impressed by the speed of the package in handling operations with large
data.frames, but am a bit overwhelmed with the syntax. I'd like to express
the SQL statement below using data.table operations rather than sqldf (which
was incredibly slow for a small subset of my financial data) or
import/export with a DBMS, but I haven't been able to figure out how to do
it. I would be grateful for your suggestions.

nick



My aim is to join events (trades) from two datasets ("edt" and "cdt") where,
for the same stock, the events in one dataset occur between 15 and 75 days
before the other, and within the same time window. I can only see how to
express the "WHERE e.SYMBOL = c.SYMBOL" part in data.table syntax. I'm also
at a loss at whether I can express the remainder using data.table's
%between% operator or not.

ctqm <- sqldf("SELECT e.*,
                 c.DATE 'DATEctrl',
                 c.TIME 'TIMEctrl',
                 c.PRICE 'PRICEctrl',
                 c.SIZE 'SIZEctrl'

                 FROM edt e, ctq c

                 WHERE e.SYMBOL = c.SYMBOL AND
                       julianday(e.DATE) - julianday(c.DATE) BETWEEN 15 AND
75 AND
                       strftime('%H:%M:%S',c.TIME) BETWEEN
strftime('%H:%M:%S',e.BEGTIME) AND strftime('%H:%M:%S',e.ENDTIME)")

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