SAS vs R discussion

one of the big differences between SAS and R is the size of the data sets each can accommodate. Out of the box, that size is limited by physical memory in R, while SAS, with virtual memory management, theoretically has no limits.

Steve Miller, Information Management Blogs, August 30, 2011

I participate in the Advanced Business Analytics, Data Mining and Predictive Modeling group on LinkedIn. It's a terrific forum, with always at least half a dozen active discussions among the now more than 26,000 members.

One recent theme, SAS versus R , particularly caught my eye. The discourse is lively, with now over 100 comments representing the different perspectives of the relative merits of both statistical platforms.

A point of discussant departure is the observation that one of the big differences between SAS and R is the size of the data sets each can accommodate. Out of the box, that size is limited by physical memory in R, while SAS, with virtual memory management, theoretically has no limits.

On my 4 GB RAM Wintel pc using the 64 bit build of R, I process a data frame with 11M records and 4 attributes - albeit barely - and adequately run all my favorite predictive models against another data set with over half a million records and 11 variables.

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