SQL

I just spent nearly two full days in a bare knuckle brawl with my Macbook Pro trying to get it to talk to a corporate MS SQL Server. I had abandoned MSSQL more than a year ago in favor of PostgreSQL because of how much easier it is to work with PostgreSQL from a non-Microsoft stack. At that point I was R running on Linux and soon R running on OS X.

So for the rest of this conversation big data == 2 Gigs. Done. Don’t give me any of this ‘that’s not big, THIS is big’ shit. There now, on with the cool stuff: This week on twitter Vince Buffalo asked about loading a 2 gig comma separated file (csv) into R (OK, he asked about tab delimited data, but I ignored that because I use mostly comma data and I wanted to test CSV.