Reading Big Data
Matt Wiley, Joshua F. Wiley · Apress eBooks · 2020
With your ability to understand manipulating data, it is now worth taking a moment to consider where data live. R works in memory, random access memory (RAM), not hard drives. A quick check of your system settings should reveal the amount of memory you have. We, the authors, use between 16 and 128 GB in our real-world systems, with the larger number being an expensive yet convenient habit. R cannot analyze data larger than available RAM. This becomes important when considering the ever larger file sizes one encounters in modern research. Too much data in RAM would stop R and your computer system from working. Thus