rqdatatable — Wrangling Lots Of Data, Fast

John Mount explains the motivation behind rqdatatable and puts together a performance test:

rquery is already one of the fastest and most teachable (due to deliberate conformity to Codd’s influential work) tools to wrangle data on databases and big data systems. And now rquery is also one of the fastest methods to wrangle data in-memory in R (thanks to data.table, via a thin adaption supplied by rqdatatable).

Teaching rquery and fully benchmarking it is a big task, so in this note we will limit ourselves to a single example and benchmark. Our intent is to use this example to promote rquery and rqdatatable, but frankly the biggest result of the benchmarking is how far out of the pack data.tableitself stands at small through large problem sizes. This is already known, but it is a much larger difference and at more scales than the typical non-data.table user may be aware of.

Click through for the benchmark and information on how to grab the package before it goes into CRAN.