Hello, I understand the performance reasons for requiring the key to be of integer type, but I often would like to use data.table's joining and grouping features with millisecond POSIXct timestamps.
One workaround is to convert the timestamps to an integer representing the milliseconds since the first timestamp, but for time ranges of larger than a few weeks, the number of milliseconds is larger than what can be stored in a 32-bit integer. I see two possible solutions: 1. Store the integer milliseconds as numeric type, which allows 64-bit integers to be stored exactly. This solution would simply require an option for data.table to assume that a numeric type is actually storing integer values. 2. Add a second, slower, sorting algorithm to data.table that could handle non-integer values. This solution would allow POSIXct types to be used directly by data.table. Are either of these solutions possible and reasonable? Or is there some workaround I'm missing to be able to use larger-than-32-bit integers as keys? -Leon _______________________________________________ datatable-help mailing list [email protected] https://lists.r-forge.r-project.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/datatable-help
