[R] big panel: filehash, bigmemory or other

[Eric Fail]

Dear R-list

I'm on my way to start a new project on a rather big panel, consisting  
of approximately 8 million observations in 30 waves of data and about  
15 variables. I have a similar data set that is approximately 7  
gigabytes in size.

Until now I have done my data management in SAS, and Stata, mostly  
identifying spells, counting events in intervals, and a like, but I  
would like to do the data management-and fitting my models-in R.

Though R can't handle the data in a normal R-way, it's simply too big.  
So I thought of trying either filehash, bigmemory or some other  
similar package I haven't heard of (yet). In the documentation to  
'bigmemory' is says  that the package is capable of ``basic  
manipulation '' on ``manageable subsets of the data '', but what does  
that actually mean?

Since learning this in R is a rather time consuming process, and I  
know SAS is capable of doing the data management, and have the proc  
mixed module, I wanted to ask on the list, before I set out on this  
odyssey.

Does anyone out there have any practical experience with data sets  
(panels) that size and maybe some experience fitting a model,  
presumably using the lmer package or alike, using filehash or  
bigmemory, that they would be willing to share?

Thanks in advance,
Eric