I'm working with a large data frame, and have run up against RAM limits. At this point, I probably need to work with a serialized version on the disk. There are a few packages to support out-of-memory operations, but I'm not sure which one will suit my needs. I'd prefer to keep everything in data frames, so the ff package looks encouraging, but there are still compatibility problems that I can't work around.
What's the first tool to reach for when you realize that your data has reached out-of-memory scale?