Fast melted data.table operations

Question

I am looking for patterns for manipulating data.table objects whose structure resembles that of dataframes created with melt from the reshape

Answer 1

> setkey(input, "id")
> input[ , list(sum(value)), by=id]
   id V1
1:  1  6
2:  2 15
3:  3 34

> input[ variable %in% c("x", "y"), list(sum(value)), by=id]
   id V1
1:  1  6
2:  2 15
3:  3 24

The last one:

> input[ variable %in% c("x", "y"), list(sum(value)), by=list(id, variable)]
   id variable V1
1:  1        x  1
2:  1        y  5
3:  2        x  4
4:  2        y 11
5:  3        x 15
6:  3        y  9