## Should this go in the SummarizedExperiment package? As an additional section
## in the vignette? As a separate vignette? As a man page? Probably the former.


## The problem
## ===========
##
## When trying to create a SummarizedExperiment object with big dimensions it's
## critical to use a memory-efficient container for the assay data. Depending
## on the nature of the data, in-memory containers that compress the data (e.g.
## a DataFrame of Rle's or a sparse matrix from the Matrix package) might help
## to a certain extent. However, even after compression some data might remain
## too big to fit in memory. In that case, one solution is to split the
## SummarizedExperiment object in smaller objects, then process the smaller
## objects separately, and finally combine the results. A disadvantage of this
## approach is that the split/process/combine mechanism is the responsibility
## of the SummarizedExperiment-based application so it makes the development of
## such applications more complicated. Having the assay data stored in an
## on-disk container like HDF5Matrix should greatly simplify this: the goal is
## to make it possible for the end-user to manipulate the big
## SummarizedExperiment object as a whole and have the split/process/combine
## mechanism automatically and transparently happen behind the scene .

## Comparison of assay data containers
## ===================================
##
## Each container has its strengths and weaknesses and which one to use exactly
## depends on several factors.
##
## DataFrame of Rle's
## ------------------
## Works great for coverage data. See ?GPos in GenomicRanges for an example.

## Sparse matrix object from the Matrix package
## --------------------------------------------
## This sounds like a natural candidate for RNA-seq count data which tends to
## be sparse. Unfortunately, because the Matrix package can only store the
## counts as doubles and not as integers, trying to use it on real RNA-seq
## count data actually increases the size of the matrix of counts:
library(Matrix)
library(airway)
data(airway)
head(assay(airway))
object.size(assay(airway))
object.size(Matrix(assay(airway), sparse=TRUE))

