Press "Enter" to skip to content

Contrasting RDS and Parquet in R

Colin Gillespie contrasts two file formats:

The RDS format is a binary file format, native to R. It has been part of R for many years, and provides a convenient method for saving R objects, including data sets.

The obvious question is which file format should you use for storing tabular data? RDS or parquet? For this comparison, I’m interested in the following characteristics:

  • the time required to save the file;
  • the file size;
  • the time required to load the file.

Read on for the throw-down.