Spotfire S+ Big Data Library

The Spotfire S+ Big Data library is a data analysis toolkit designed
specifically for exploring data sets that are too big to fit into
memory. The Big Data library provides the following features:

* Spotfire S+ operates on the data binary cache file directly, using
  "streaming" techniques, where data flows through the application
  rather than being processed all at once in memory. The cache file is
  processed on a row-by-row basis, meaning that only a small part of the
  data is stored in RAM at any one time. It is this out-of-memory data
  processing technique that enables Spotfire S+ to process data sets hundreds
  of megabytes, or even gigabytes, in size without requiring large
  quantities of RAM.

* Although the large data set is stored on the hard drive, the
  scalable algorithms of the Big Data library are designed to optimize
  access to the data, reading from disk a minimum number of times. Many
  techniques require a single pass through the data, and the data is
  read from the disk in blocks, not randomly, to minimize disk access
  times.

* It introduces the large data frame, an object of class bdFrame.  A
  big data frame object is similar in function to standard Spotfire S+ data
  frames, except its data is stored in a cache file on disk, rather than
  in RAM. The bdFrame object is essentially a reference to that external
  file: While you can create a bdFrame object that represents an
  extremely large data set, the bdFrame object itself requires very
  little RAM.

Find help for the Big Data library in the 
      "Big Data User's Guide",
which is available from the Help > Online Manuals menu in Spotfire S+
(Windows) or SHOME/doc/bigdata.pdf (Unix). Help topics for individual
functions are integrated in the Language Reference, available from the
Help menu by navigating to Help -> Available Help -> Language
Reference (Windows) or requesting help for a specific function, e.g.
by entering

    help(bd.sample)

at the Commands window to display help for the function bd.sample
(Windows or Unix).

To load the Big Data library:

* In Windows, click on File -> Load Library -> bigdata
* From the Commands window (Windows or UNIX), enter

    library(bigdata)
