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data.table
High-performance data frame for large-scale data manipulation in R
What it is
A high-performance replacement for base R's data.frame, designed for fast aggregation, joins, and column operations on large in-memory datasets, with benchmarks on up to two billion rows. It offers a fast file reader and writer, low-level multithreaded parallelism, ordered and non-equi joins, and memory-efficient grouped operations that avoid copying. R users handling large tabular data—common in quantitative research pipelines—will find its concise syntax reduces both typing and programming time. The syntax is compact and idiomatic to the package, so it takes some learning before the conciseness pays off.
At a glance
Worth watchingOur rating, based on popularity, maintenance and how ready it is for real use.
| Best for | Professional quants |
|---|---|
| Used for | Data analysis |
| Markets | Multi-market |
| Stack | R |
| Learning curve | Moderate learning curve |
| Practical value | High practical value |
| Cost | Free and open source |
| Hardware | No GPU needed |
| Maintenance | Commits today |
GitHub stars, last 30 days
Daily snapshots since 2026-09-12 (up to 30 days): +9 over the period, now 3,926. Gaps mean no snapshot was taken that day.
Extension of data.frame: Fast aggregation of large data (e.g. 100GB in RAM), fast ordered joins, fast add/modify/delete of columns by group using no copies at all, list columns and a fast file r