[R] How to read HUGE data sets?

[Liviu Andronic]

On 2/28/08, Gabor Grothendieck <ggrothendieck at gmail.com> wrote:
>  The sqldf package can read a subset of rows and columns (actually any
>  sql operation)
>  from a file larger than R can otherwise handle.  It will automatically
>  set up a temporary
>  SQLite database for you, load the file into the database without going
>  through R and
>  extract just the data you want into R and then automatically delete
>  the database.  All this
>  can be done in 2 lines of code.

Is it realistic to use this approach for datasets as big as 30-40 GB?

Liviu