What is the difference between data frame and data table
Data frame is one of the basic data structures in R. You can perform many manipulations on a data frame like selection, subsetting, merging, stacking, unstacking etc. However, data in a data frame is all in memory.
So, obviously there is a limit to how much data you can manipulate in a data frame. Data tables are created with the following in mind
- Easy and fast grouping
- Easy SQL like syntax for filtering
- Faster joins
- Index based retrieval
- Faster file reading
- Ability to check the amount of memory used