title: Best practices for storing and using data frames too large for memory?
body: <p>I'm working with a large data frame, and have run up against RAM limits. At this point, I probably need to work with a serialized version on the disk. There are <a href="http://cran.r-project.org/web/views/HighPerformanceComputing.html" rel="noreferrer">a few packages</a> to support out-of-memory operations, but I'm not sure which one will suit my needs. I'd prefer to keep everything in data frames, so the <code>ff</code> package looks encouraging, but there are still compatibility problems that I can't work around.</p>
  
  <p>What's the first tool to reach for when you realize that your data has reached out-of-memory scale?</p>