About

This blog is dedicated to building the community around the data.table R package. Its startup is funded by NSF-POSE Grant called “Expanding the data.table ecosystem for efficient big data manipulation in R”. Here you will find announcements related to the grant, as well as tips, updates, and tutorials for data.table and its sister packages.

Blog managed by Kelly Bodwin, Tyson Barrett, and Toby Hocking. Email us at r.data.table@gmail.com.

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Comparing `data.table` reshape to `duckdb` and `polars`

One element of the NSF POSE grant for data.table is to create benchmarks which can inform users about when data.table could be more performant than similar software. Two…

Toby Dylan Hocking

Visualizing performance regression of `data.table` with `atime`

Since August 2023, I have been working on performance testing, which could be useful for expanding the open-source ecosystem around data.table package in R. This could…

Doris Afriyie Amoakohene

Seal of Approval: mlr3

Author(s): Michel Lang, Bernd Bischl, Jakob Richter, Patrick Schratz, Martin Binder, Florian Pfisterer, Raphael Sonabend, Marc Becker, Sebastian Fischer

Maximilian Mücke

Seal of Approval: collapse

Author(s): Sebastian Krantz

Sebastian Krantz

Newly awarded translation projects

We are pleased to fund a French translation project, led by Philippe Grosjean, who is also the leader of the base R French translation. Co-authors include Christian Wia…

Toby Dylan Hocking

Seal of Approval: dtplyr

Author(s): Hadley Wickham, Maximilian Girlich, Mark Fairbanks, Ryan Dickerson, Posit Software PBC

Seal of Approval: nc

Maintainer: Toby Dylan Hocking (toby.hocking@r-project.org)

Toby Dylan Hocking

Seal of Approval: tidyfast

Author(s): Tyson S. Barrett, Mark Fairbanks, Ivan Leung, Indrajeet Patil

Tyson S. Barrett

Announcement: The ‘Seal of Approval’

The Community Team, alongside a group of regular data.table contributors, is very pleased to announce a new Seal of Approval program!

Announcement: Paola Corrales, data.table Ambassador

Paola is a professor teaching Data Science at Guillermo Brown University in Argentina, a developer of R packages and teaching materials, and a leader of the LatinR…

Two Roads Diverged

Two roads diverged in a wood and I, I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.

Testing infrastructure for data.table

One major element of the NSF POSE grant for data.table is to create more documentation and testing infrastructure, in order to help expand the data.table ecosystem. This…

Community interviews about data.table

One stipulation of NSF POSE funded projects like this one was to conduct several interviews under NSF’s I-CORPS program (Winter 2024 Cohort), to gather information as to how …

Results of the 2023 survey

Thanks to everyone who helped create, shared, or filled out the first data.table survey! The survey was officially open between October 17 and December 1 and it received 391 …

Column assignment and reference semantics in data.table

The goal of this blog post is to explain some similarities and differences between the base R data.frame object type, and the data.table object type. We will focus on…

The Benefits of `data.table` Syntax

Among the many reasons to use data.table in your code (which includes the more common answers of speed, memory efficiency, etc.) is the syntax. The syntax is

New governance, release with new features

I am proud to report that today, the first major new data.table features in several years have been released to CRAN!

Toby Dylan Hocking

Piping data.tables

Like a devoted plumber, modern R loves pipes. The magrittr pipe has a long history and it’s fair share of detractors, but with the implementation of the native pipe operator …

Elio Campitelli

Announcement: Jan Gorecki, data.table Ambassador

Jan is a natural choice for an Ambassador, due to his many years of fantastic contribution to the data.table package. You can find his great work in open-source development…

Summary of LatinR conference

Last month, I (Toby) went to the LatinR conference in Montevideo, Uruguay. I had two goals: to teach about data.table in a tutorial, and to find people to work on…

Toby Dylan Hocking

Announcement: The data.table Ambassadors Travel Grant

We on the community team are very excited to announce another major funding opportunity!

Announcement: data.table translation projects

In 2023-2025, National Science Foundation (NSF) has provided funds to support the project “Expanding the data.table ecosystem for efficient big data manipulation in R.” One…

Welcome to the data.table ecosystem project!

An NSF-POSE funded venture.

Hi! My name is Toby Dylan Hocking, and I have been using R since 2003, which means 20 years, can you believe it?