How many unique keys does my data.table have?

Question

Given a data.table, how do I find the number of unique keys it contains?

library(data.table)
z <- data.table(id=c(1,2,1,3),key=\"id\")
length(uni         


        

Answer 1

I'll expand my comment as an answer.

base::unique (unique.default) on vectors uses hash tables and is quite efficient, with average complexity of O(1) - this is very likely to be the general case. The worst case complexity is O(n). But the chances of that happening at each insert/search should be extremely rare - it must be a terrible hash function if it does.

In your question, you've only one key column, and therefore base's unique should be quite efficient. However, on more than one column, unique.data.frame is very inefficient - as it coerces all the columns to characters, then pastes them together and then calls unique.default on it.

You can use:

nrow(unique(z))

data.table's unique method, by default, provides key columns to its by argument. And since we know the data is already sorted, instead of ordering, we use data.table:::uniqlist to fetch the indices corresponding to unique rows much more efficiently in O(n) as well. It's therefore efficient on any amount of key columns.

However we could add this information as an attribute while setting the key, as it's quite straightforward.