Enhancing a data.frame with a data.table

When you process a dataset that is a Gigabyte or larger in size, you may find that a data.frame is rather inefficient. To address this issue, you can use the enhanced extension of data.frame—data.table. In this recipe, we will show how to create a data.table in R.

Getting ready

Download the purchase_view.tab and purchase_order.tab datasets from the following GitHub links, respectively:

• https://github.com/ywchiu/rcookbook/blob/master/chapter6/purchase_view.tab

• https://github.com/ywchiu/rcookbook/blob/master/chapter6/purchase_order.tab

How to do it…

Perform the following steps to create a data.table:

1. First, install and load the data.table package using the following commands:

   > install.packages("data.table")
   > library(data.table)
   

2. Next, we can create an R data frame using read.table:

   > purchase <- read.table("purchase_view.tab", header=TRUE, sep='\t')
    [1] "data.frame"
   > dim(purchase)
   [1] 1191486       4
   
   > order <- read.table("purchase_order...