Dear All,
As you might have noticed, "zipping" a .dta file often results in
compressed files that are less than one tenth of the original file size.
I couldn't find any documentation on a compressed stata file format - if
there is, please let me know and ignore the rest of this message. I
solve the problem of large files (in Windows) by compressing the folder,
so it uses less disk space, but it is still a problem when you want to
transfer or transport files.
I don't really know what it would take, but my guess is that it wouldn't
be too hard to store the files in some sort of compressed format, and
having Stata decompressing them on the fly when opening. I could even
think of having very large datasets (larger than physical memory)
compressed in memory... but that would probably slow things too much.
Since I don't think this will be implemented soon, could someone share
experiences on invoking Windows apps from within stata? I'm thinking
about doing some sort of "usezip" program that would open .zip files...
Thank you!
All the best,
g.
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