Managing data with a data.table

The two major advantages of a data.table as compared to a data.frame are the speed and clearer syntax of the former. Similar to a data.frame, we can perform operations to slice and subset a data.table. Here, we introduce some operations that you can perform on data.table.

Getting ready

Ensure that you completed the Enhancing a data.frame with a data.table recipe to load purchase_view.tab and purchase_order.tab as both data.frame and data.table into your R environment.

How to do it…

Perform the following steps to perform data manipulation on data.table:

1. First, use the head function to view the first three rows:

   > head(purchase.dt[1:3])
                     Time Action         User     Product
   1: 2015-07-01 00:00:01   view   U129297265 P0023468384
   2: 2015-07-01 00:00:03   view   U321001337 P0018926456
   3: 2015-07-01 00:00:05   view U10070718237 P0000063593
   
   > head(purchase[1:3])
                    Time Action         User
   1 2015-07-01 00:00:01   view   U129297265...