(Originally posted on Stuart's MATLAB Videos blog.)

Recently I have been using MATLAB tables a lot to store large heterogenous datasets. In many cases, the rows contain information about files in a file system. As I need to access the files sequentially, I can't vectorize the code that constructs the table. Instead I need to build it one row at a time.

Here I review a few methods for building large MATLAB tables that require scalar operations like this, and I compare the relative speed of these methods.

See the documentation on MATLAB tables for more information.