[R] Any way to add to data frame saved as .rData file?

[Ken Termiso]

>
>I'd put the extra columns in their own data frame, and save that to disk 
>(use dates/times/process ids or some other unique identifier in the 
>filenames to distinguish them).  When you need access to a mixture of 
>columns, load (or source, depending how you did the save) the columns you 
>need, and cbind them together into one big data frame.
>
>If you are concerned about memory requirements when producing the pieces, 
>watch out that you don't write out so much data that you'll never have 
>enough memory to load all you need at once.
>
>Duncan Murdoch


hmm...maybe i should just be dumping to a text file instead of a data 
frame..is there any way (without using a real SQL database) in R to create a 
file that i can selectively load certain columns from?

if not, maybe i should break the data frame up into pieces (as you 
suggested) and create a separate file that keeps track of which columns are 
stored in which files (like a hashtable) and just load the small file of 
keys each time i need to load something..

whaddya think??