ffbase

I'm trying to work with a 1909x139352 dataset using R. Since my computer only has 2GB of RAM, the dataset turns out to be too big (500MB) for the conventional methods. So I decided to use the ff package. However, I've been having some troubles. The function read.table.ffdf is unable to read the first chunk of data. It crashes with the next error: txtdata <- read.table.ffdf(file="/directory/myfile.csv", FUN="read.table", header=FALSE, sep=",", colClasses=c("factor",rep("integer",139351)), first.rows=100, next.rows=100, VERBOSE=TRUE) read.table.ffdf 1..100 (100) csv-read=77.253sec Error en ff

I'm new to R and the FF package, and am trying to better understand how FF allows users to work with large datasets (>4Gb). I have spent a considerable amount of time trawling the web for tutorials, but the ones I could find generally go over my head. I learn best by doing, so as an exercise, I would like to know how to create a long-format time-series dataset, similar to R's in-built "Indometh" dataset, using arbitrary values. Then I would like to reshape it into wide format. Then I would like to save the output as a csv file. With small datasets this is simple, and can be achieved using the