Trick question: is a 10,000 cell numeric data.frame big or small? In the era of “big data” 10,000 cells is minuscule. Such data could be fit on fewer than 1,000 punched cards (or less than half a box). The joking answer is: it is small when they are selling you […]
We are excited to announce the rquery R package. rquery is Win-Vector LLC‘s currently in development big data query tool for R. rquery supplies set of operators inspired by Edgar F. Codd‘s relational algebra (updated to reflect lessons learned from working with R, SQL, and dplyr at big data scale […]
For some time we have been teaching R users "when working with wide tables on Spark or on databases: narrow to the columns you really want to work with early in your analysis." The idea behind the advice is: working with fewer columns makes for quicker queries. photo: Jacques Henri […]
Win-Vector LLC is proud to introduce two important new tool families (with documentation) in the 0.5.0 version of seplyr (also now available on CRAN): partition_mutate_se() / partition_mutate_qt(): these are query planners/optimizers that work over dplyr::mutate() assignments. When using big-data systems through R (such as PostgreSQL or Apache Spark) these planners […]
Recently I noticed that the R package sparklyr had the following odd behavior: suppressPackageStartupMessages(library("dplyr")) library("sparklyr") packageVersion("dplyr") #> [1] ‘0.7.2.9000’ packageVersion("sparklyr") #> [1] ‘0.6.2’ packageVersion("dbplyr") #> [1] ‘1.1.0.9000’ sc <- spark_connect(master = ‘local’) #> * Using Spark: 2.1.0 d <- dplyr::copy_to(sc, data.frame(x = 1:2)) dim(d) #> [1] NA ncol(d) #> [1] […]
In our latest R and Big Data article we discuss replyr. Why replyr replyr stands for REmote PLYing of big data for R. Why should R users try replyr? Because it lets you take a number of common working patterns and apply them to remote data (such as databases or […]
In our latest “R and big data” article we show how to manage intermediate results in non-trivial Apache Spark workflows using R, sparklyr, dplyr, and replyr.
Python has a fairly famous design principle (from “PEP 20 — The Zen of Python”): There should be one– and preferably only one –obvious way to do it. Frankly in R (especially once you add many packages) there is usually more than one way. As an example we will talk […]
Our next "R and big data tip" is: summarizing big data. We always say "if you are not looking at the data, you are not doing science"- and for big data you are very dependent on summaries (as you can’t actually look at everything). Simple question: is there an easy […]
When working with big data with R (say, using Spark and sparklyr) we have found it very convenient to keep data handles in a neat list or data_frame. Please read on for our handy hints on keeping your data handles neat.