 <p>I'll explain my short story with R and big data set.<br> I had a connector from R to RDBMS, </p> <ul> <li>where I stored 80mln compounds.</li> </ul> <p>I've build a queries which gathered some subset of this data.<br> Then manipulate on this subset.<br> R was simply choking with more than <strong>200k</strong> rows in memory on my PC. </p> <ul> <li>core duo</li> <li>4 GB ram</li> </ul> <p>So working on some appropriate subset for machine is good approach.</p>