[datatable-help] Is data.table ready for prime-timeandsensitive work?

[Rob Forler]

I'm coding in python now. The group I'm in now has a similar tool (closed
source)  to data.table but in python and is based on numpy.

The api isn't as beautiful as data.table's, but has similar functionality.

-Rob

On Tue, Dec 7, 2010 at 7:54 AM, Matthew Dowle <mdowle at mdowle.plus.com>wrote:

>  Thanks Rob. That begs an obvious question then ... what are you coding in
> now ?
>
> "Rob Forler" <rforler at uchicago.edu> wrote in message
> news:AANLkTikSsoy8F6aKuQYXW5GWeMLiE+Y07D_3X+K7AeX=@mail.gmail.com...
>   I can attest that I used data.table very extensively for several months
> on large datasets (financial). I was replacing a fair of poorly coded
> data/frame, sql, plyr, apply code, and was able to match the previous
> numbers and do a significant amount of new analysis because of the ease of
> using data.tables.
>
> If I was still coding in R on a regular basis you can gauarauntee I'd use
> data.table every day.
>
> Thanks,
> Rob
>
> On Tue, Dec 7, 2010 at 7:30 AM, Matthew Dowle <mdowle at mdowle.plus.com>wrote:
>
>> Just to clarify also about the date of first release - March 2010? Any
>> chance Mel you looked at the CRAN archive page and read off the last row?
>> Oldest is first not last on that page :
>>
>> http://cran.r-project.org/src/contrib/Archive/data.table/
>>
>> v1.0 was released April 2006 but that was removed from CRAN happily
>> because
>> base quickly (within weeks) included features that removed the need for
>> data.table.  It was re-released in Aug 2008 with new functionality so
>> that's
>> the relevant release date for your purpose.
>>
>> Feel free to post the puzzling results. You've done well to use it for 2
>> weeks without posting, so you can probably tilt towards using this list
>> more
>> (on a new thread please). If we can get you over those hurdles first then
>> reconsider if the 'robustness' question still stands.
>>
>> Other info which you may have not have found yet ...
>>
>> Crantastic has 5 detailed user reviews of data.table. It does state that
>> v1.1 was released over 2 years ago, too, so leads me to guess you may have
>> missed the link to crantastic on the data.table homepage.
>>
>> There are some oddities in the ranking formula but if you look at
>> http://crantastic.org/popcon and realise that the batch near the bottom
>> starting with reshape, ggplot2 and plyr should be at the top (seems like a
>> bug, I'll let them know) then data.table appears to be around the 8th most
>> popular CRAN package with average score 4.7/5 and 10 users, compared to
>> ggplot2's 39 users.  So crantastic itself is not popular since everyone
>> knows that ggplot2 has many more than 39 users, and some very popular and
>> stable packages don't have any votes at all. Even so perhaps this small
>> amount of data may be useful in your assessment generally.  "data.table"
>> is
>> not the easiest to google for.
>>
>> The NEWS file (link on the homepage) says that v1.2 was released in Aug
>> 2008, too, at the bottom, along with what changed in each release since
>> then.
>>
>> Matthew
>>
>> "Tom Short" <tshort.rlists at gmail.com> wrote in message
>> news:AANLkTik=0j5da9j8_zVaW4DZhygKg6oqRP1Pg+JG3TFg at mail.gmail.com...
>>  > On Mon, Dec 6, 2010 at 10:54 PM, mbacou <mel at mbacou.com> wrote:
>> >> My question is: is data.table ready for production? Would you rely on
>> it
>> >> for
>> >> sensitive publications?
>> >
>> > If you have tight time deadlines, you may want to go with what you
>> > have experience with, especially if it involves complicated queries or
>> > manipulations. If you've already tried the data.table features you'll
>> > need for "production", then using data.table may help you get things
>> > done faster.
>> >
>> > Data.table has been robust for me on 6-GB datasets on a machine with
>> > 24 GB of ram. With data.table, as with most tools, user error is more
>> > likely than a tool bug, so you need to test/check your data and your
>> > results.
>> >
>> > - Tom
>>
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> datatable-help mailing list
>> datatable-help at lists.r-forge.r-project.org
>>
>> https://lists.r-forge.r-project.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/datatable-help
>>
>
>  ------------------------------
>
> _______________________________________________
> datatable-help mailing list
> datatable-help at lists.r-forge.r-project.org
> https://lists.r-forge.r-project.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/datatable-help
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> datatable-help mailing list
> datatable-help at lists.r-forge.r-project.org
> https://lists.r-forge.r-project.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/datatable-help
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.r-forge.r-project.org/pipermail/datatable-help/attachments/20101207/ce1aef02/attachment.htm>