Q:

Example of bigmemory and friends with file backing

I am interested in exploring how R can handle data out-of-memory. I've found the bigmemory package and friends (bigtabulate and biganalytics), but was hoping that someone could point me to a worked out example that uses file backing with these packages. Any other out-of-memory tips would also be appreciated.

A:

Charlie, just email Mike and Jay, they have a number of examples working around the ASA 'flights' database example from a year or two ago.
Edit: In fact, the Documentation tab has what I had in mind; the scripts are also on the site.

A:

Take a look at "CRAN Task View: High-Performance and Parallel Computing with R". There is a chapter "Large memory and out-of-memory data" where severel solutions are mentioned. For example package ff.

